Dozens of people have been killed and hundreds injured in clashes between student protesters and police in Bangladesh.
Dozens of protesters have died in the Bangladeshi capital Dhaka as nationwide student protests over the distribution of public service jobs have turned increasingly violent. Student protesters continued clashes with police and pro-government activists on Friday after days of protests that torched government buildings and severely disrupted telecommunications. Al Jazeera’s Tanvir Chowdhury, reporting from the capital, Dhaka, said:
Everything remains very volatile, intense, and it’s very critical right now. Just a quarter mile from where I am, there are about six universities, which were demonstrating since morning, and we can still hear gunfire, stun grenades and all sorts of noises coming from that area because the students refused to leave.
The death toll in Thursday’s violence rose to 32, AFP news agency reported on Friday.
Students have taken to the streets to demand a change in a system in which a third of public sector jobs are reserved for relatives of veterans of Pakistan’s 1971 war of independence.
The students called the current arrangement discrimination and demanded that hiring be based on the qualifications of each individual candidate.
In a bid to quell the protests, authorities shut down mobile internet across the country on Thursday. However, this did not help, on the contrary, according to medics, Thursday’s protests had the highest number of fatalities. A total of 32 people have died since the protests began, independent sources said.
The BBC’s Bengali service has so far been able to confirm the deaths of 17 people, including a 32-year-old Dhaka Times journalist. Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina had called for calm among the students the night before, but the situation only worsened.
On Thursday, police fired tear gas and rubber bullets against the students who had lined up in human chains across the streets. According to a BTV spokesman, the students who stormed the broadcaster’s building had set fire to a police station before doing so. He told Agence France Presse:
They chased the police officers when they took refuge at the BTV office. Angry protesters then caused mayhem here.
