At least 9,000 people have been arrested in Bangladesh since the unrest began.
Dhaka:
A Bangladeshi student group has vowed to resume protests that have sparked a deadly police crackdown and nationwide unrest unless several of their leaders are released from custody on Sunday.
Last week’s violence killed at least 205 people, according to an AFP count using police and hospital data, in one of the biggest upheavals of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s 15-year term.
Army patrols and a nationwide curfew remain in effect more than a week after they were imposed, and a police network has captured thousands of protesters, including at least half a dozen student leaders.
Members of the Students Against Discrimination group, whose campaign against civil service employment quotas precipitated the unrest, said they would end their week-long protest moratorium.
The group’s head, Nahid Islam, and others “should be released and the cases against them dropped,” Abdul Hannan Masud told journalists in an online briefing late Saturday.
Masud, who did not reveal his location because he was hiding from authorities, also demanded that “visible action” be taken against government ministers and police officers responsible for the deaths of protesters.
“Otherwise, Students Against Discrimination will be forced to launch harsh protests” starting Monday, he said.
Islam and two other senior members of the protest group were forcibly discharged on Friday from a hospital in the capital Dhaka and taken away by a group of plainclothes detectives.
Earlier this week, Islam told AFP he was being treated in hospital for injuries police inflicted on him during a previous round of arrest and said he feared for his life.
Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan told reporters on Friday that the trio had been taken into custody for their own safety, but did not confirm whether they had been formally arrested.
Police told AFP on Sunday that detectives took two others into custody, while a Students Against Discrimination activist told AFP that a third was taken 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 the curfew imposed last weekend remains in force, it was progressively eased throughout the week, a sign of the Hasina government’s confidence that order was gradually being restored.
Telecommunications Minister Zunaid Ahmed Palak told reporters that the country’s mobile internet network would be restored later on Sunday, 11 days after a nationwide blackout imposed at the height of the unrest.
Fixed broadband connections had already been restored on Tuesday, but the vast majority of Bangladesh’s 141 million internet users rely on their mobile devices to connect to the world, according to the national telecommunications regulator.
Jobs crisis
Protests began this month against the reintroduction of a quota scheme that reserves more than half of all public jobs for certain groups. With around 18 million young Bangladeshis unemployed, according to government data, the move has deeply upset graduates who are facing a severe employment crisis.
Critics say the quota is used to hoard government jobs with supporters of the ruling Awami League.
The Supreme Court reduced the number of reserved jobs last week, but did not meet protesters’ demands to abolish quotas entirely.
Hasina has ruled Bangladesh since 2009 and won a fourth consecutive election in January after a vote without genuine opposition.
His government is accused by human rights groups of misusing state institutions to consolidate its grip on power and repress dissent, including the extrajudicial killing of opposition activists.
The protests remained largely peaceful until attacks by police and pro-government student groups on demonstrators last week.
(Except the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
This story originally appeared on Ndtv.com read the full story
