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Shortly after seven top leaders including acting secretary general Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir were denied bail yesterday, Bangladesh’s main opposition party called a 36-hour non-stop strike from |
Khandker Mosharraf Hossain, senior Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) standing committee member, announced the strike at a press briefing in the party’s headquarters where leaders of former prime minister Khaleda Zia’s 18-party alliance held a meeting.
The meeting was convened as a court in Dhaka granted bail to three BNP lawmakers while denied bail to its seven top leaders including Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir in seven vandalism
cases, Xinhua reported.
Hossain said: “Our top leaders are still in jail along with many activists. Our demand for holding the next elections under a non-partisan government has not yet been met. That’s why we are declaring a general strike from 6am on April 23 to 6pm on April 24.”
He also announced protest programmes in all district Sadar Upazilas including Dhaka on April 27.
Demanding release of the leaders, BNP had enforced a
36-hour strike on April 9.
Earlier in the day, Moudud Ahmed, Barkatullah Bulu and Shahid Uddin Chowdhury Annie won bail in several cases.
According to the charges, the BNP leaders were involved in torching vehicles, assaulting police and obstructing work of the cops during the opposition’s agitation programmes earlier this month.
Police had raided the BNP’s Naya Paltan headquarters and arrested 151 leaders and activists of the main opposition party on March 11. Later, a Dhaka court had also sent several senior BNP leaders including acting secretary general Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir, standing committee member Moudud Ahmed to jail.
Hossain said: “The government is not listening to the demands of the 18-party alliance even after various protest programmes. We will force the government to meet our demands through tougher movement.”
“It’s beyond question. The top leaders can never engage themselves in the activities for which they have been charged,” said BNP joint secretary-general Mahbub Uddin Khokon.
Speaking after the court’s verdict against the leaders, Khokon, also a BNP lawmaker, termed the cases filed against the party’s top leaders as “politically
motivated.”
The cases were aimed at weakening BNP’s protest to unseat Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s Awami League (AL) when BNP and its allies geared up anti-government agitation programmes, he said.
BNP has long been demanding that the government pass a bill in parliament for reinstating a caretaker government system for overseeing the next general
elections slated for 2014.
Hasina’s party, which has two-thirds majority in parliament, annulled the caretaker government system after Supreme Court on May 2011 repealed the 13th amendment in the country’s constitution through which the caretaker system was institutionalized in 1996 by the then BNP government under pressure from the then main opposition AL, now the ruling party.