Bangladeshi student group has vowed on July 28 to resume protests that sparked a lethal police crackdown and nationwide unrest unless several of their leaders are released from custody.
“Last week’s violence killed at least 205 people”, according to an AFP count of police and hospital data, in one of the biggest upheavals of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s 15-year tenure.
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Army patrols and a nationwide curfew remain in place more than a week after they were imposed and a police dragnet has scooped up thousands of protesters including at least half a dozen student leaders.
Members of Students Against Discrimination group, whose campaign against civil service job quotas precipitated the unrest, said they would end their weeklong protest moratorium.
The group's chief Nahid Islam and others "should be freed and the cases against them must be withdrawn", Abdul Hannan Masud, one of the coordinators of the anti-discrimination group, said in an online briefing on July 27.
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Abdul, who did not disclose his location because he was in hiding from authorities, also demanded "visible actions" be taken against Government Ministers and police officers responsible for the deaths of protesters.
“Otherwise, Students Against Discrimination will be forced to launch tough protests from July 29,” he added.
Nahid Islam and two other senior members of the protest group were forcibly discharged from hospital on July 26 in the capital Dhaka and taken away by a group of plainclothes detectives.
Earlier in the week Nahid Islam told AFP he was being treated at the hospital for injuries police inflicted on him during an earlier round of detention and said he was in fear for his life.
Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan told reporters on July 26 that the trio were taken into custody for their own safety but did not confirm if they had been formally arrested.
Police told AFP on July 28 that detectives had taken two others into custody, while a Students Against Discrimination activist told AFP that another person had been taken on July 28 morning.
“At least 9,000 people have been arrested nationwide since the unrest began,” according to Prothom Alo, a Bangladesh’s newspaper.
Telecommunications Minister Zunaid Ahmed Palak told reporters the country's mobile internet network would be restored later on July 28, eleven days after a nationwide blackout imposed at the height of the unrest.
“Fixed line broadband connections had already been restored on July 23 but the vast majority of Bangladesh’s 141 million internet users rely on their mobile devices to connect with the world,” according to the National telecoms regulator.
‘Job crisis’
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Protests began this month over the reintroduction of a quota scheme reserving more than half of all government jobs for certain groups.
With around 18 million young Bangladeshis out of work — as per the government figures — the move deeply upset graduates facing an acute employment crisis.
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Critics say the quota is used to stack public jobs with loyalists to the ruling Awami League. The Supreme Court cut the number of reserved jobs last week but fell short of protesters' demands to scrap the quotas entirely.
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