Bangladesh announces a nationwide curfew and the deployment of military forces after police failed to quell days of deadly unrest spreading throughout the country.
Bangladesh has imposed a curfew across the country and deployed the army amid widening student-led protests.
The Dhaka Medical College Hospital received 27 dead bodies between 5pm and 7pm, local time, on Friday."The rising death toll is a shocking indictment of the absolute intolerance shown by the Bangladeshi authorities to protest and dissent," Babu Ram Pant, the deputy regional director for South Asia at Amnesty International, says.
The internet shutdown meant many people could not top up their electricity meters, leaving them without power. Tarique Rahman, the acting chairman of the main opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party, says many opposition leaders, activists and students have been arrested since violence broke out.Protesters told Reuters in a text message that leading student coordinator Nahid Islam was arrested at 2am on Saturday.
The unrest has been fuelled by high unemployment among young people, who make up nearly a fifth of a population of 170 million. Police fire was the cause of more than half of the deaths reported so far this week, based on descriptions given to AFP by hospital staff. Dhaka Metropolitan Police spokesman Faruk Hossain told AFP that officers had arrested Ruhul Kabir Rizvi Ahmed, one of the top leaders of the main opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party .Near-daily marches this month have called for an end to a quota system that reserves more than half of civil service posts for specific groups, including children of veterans from the country's 1971 liberation war against Pakistan.
Protest Civil Unrest Job Quota System Government Jobs Curfew Autocratic Regime Sheikh Hasina Civil Rights
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