Clashes in Bangladesh as opposition enforces strike

Police officers arrest an alleged activist of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) suspected of throwing pieces of bricks during a strike in Dhaka yesterday.

DPA/Dhaka

Opposition activists in Bangladesh clashed with police, set off homemade bombs and torched vehicles yesterday during a nationwide strike called to demand the release of their detained leaders.

The Bangladesh Nationalist Party-led opposition alliance called the shutdown from 6am (local time) to demand the release of more than 150 leaders and activists arrested after clashes with police this month.

Schools and businesses were shut, most vehicles stayed off highways and traffic was thin in the capital Dhaka. But railway services ran as normal across the country.

“The people responded to the strike spontaneously against the government’s repression of the opposition activists,” said Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir, acting secretary general of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP).

The leaders and activists arrested on March 11 were charged with vandalism, arson and attacks on public property after a spate of violence followed the sentencing of an Islamist leader to death for war crimes during the 1971 war of independence against Pakistan.

At least 90 people were killed in the violence after Delawar Hossain Sayedee - vice president of the Jamaat-e-Islami party, an ally of the BNP - was convicted last month of murder, rape, looting and the forcible conversion of Hindus to Islam during the war that left an estimated 3mn people dead.

Yesterday, strikers set cars on fire, clashed with police, erected barricades on main roads and exploded homemade bombs in different parts of the country, police said.

Protesters in the north-eastern district of Sylhet hurled crude bombs at a police van, leaving two officers injured, police officer Rezaul Karim said.

Police fired teargas as activists clashed with officers, he said.