A Bangladeshi student group has vowed to resume protests if several of its leaders are not released from detention on Sunday, which sparked a deadly police crackdown and nationwide unrest.
At least 205 people were killed in last week’s violence, one of the biggest upheavals of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s 15-year tenure, according to an AFP count based on police and hospital figures.
Army patrols and a nationwide curfew continue more than a week after it was imposed, and police have arrested thousands of protesters, including at least a half-dozen student leaders.
Members of Students Against Discrimination, whose campaign against civil service job quotas had sparked the unrest, said they would end their week-long protests.
Abdul Hannan Masood told reporters in an online briefing late Saturday that the group’s chief Nahid Islam and others “should be released and cases against them withdrawn.”
Mr Masood, who did not reveal his location as he was hiding from the authorities, also demanded that “clear action” be taken against government ministers and police officials responsible for the deaths of protesters.
“Otherwise, the students will be forced to launch strong protests from Monday against discrimination,” he said.
Mr. Islam and two other senior members of the protest group were forcibly discharged from a hospital in the capital, Dhaka, on Friday and taken away by a group of plainclothes detectives.
Earlier this week, Mr Islam told AFP he was being treated in hospital for injuries inflicted by police during an earlier detention and that his life was in danger.
Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan told reporters on Friday that the three had been detained for their safety but did not confirm whether they had been formally arrested.
Police told AFP on Sunday that detectives had detained two others, while a Students Against Discrimination activist told AFP a third man was detained on Sunday morning.
At least 9,000 people have been arrested across the country since the unrest began, according to Prothom Alo, Bangladesh’s largest daily newspaper.
Although a curfew imposed last weekend is still in place, it has been gradually eased over the week, signalling the Hasina government’s confidence that order is slowly being restored.
Telecommunications Minister Junaid Ahmed Palak told reporters the country’s mobile internet network would be restored on Sunday, 11 days after a nationwide blackout was imposed at the peak of the unrest.
Fixed-line broadband connections were restored on Tuesday, according to the national telecoms regulator, but most of Bangladesh’s 141 million internet users rely on their mobile devices to connect to the world.
jobs crisis
Protests have erupted this month over the reintroduction of a quota scheme that reserves more than half of government jobs for certain groups. With about 18 million young Bangladeshis unemployed, according to government data, the move has hit graduates who are facing a severe employment crisis.
Critics say the quota is used to place loyalists of the ruling Awami League in public jobs.
The Supreme Court last week reduced the number of reserved jobs but could not meet the protesters’ demand to abolish the quota completely.
Hasina has been ruling Bangladesh since 2009 and won her fourth consecutive term in January after an unopposed vote.
Human rights groups have accused his government of abusing state institutions to consolidate its grip on power and suppress dissent, including through extrajudicial killings of opposition activists.
The protests had been largely peaceful until attacks on protesters by police and pro-government student groups last week.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
