Bangladesh students promise to restart protests unless leaders are released

•  The group’s leaders, including Nahid Islam, have been detained and their cases against them have been withdrawn.
• Abdul Hannan Masud, the group’s chief, demands the release of Islam and other leaders and the withdrawal of their cases.
• The group’s chief, Nahid Islam, and two other senior members were forcibly discharged from a hospital in Dhaka.

A Bangladeshi student group vowed to resume protests that led to a lethal 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 a source count of police and hospital data, marking one of the biggest upheavals during Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s 15-year tenure.

Army patrols and a nationwide curfew remain in place more than a week after their imposition, and police have detained thousands of protesters, including at least half a dozen student leaders. Members of Students Against Discrimination, whose campaign against civil service job quotas triggered the unrest, announced they would end their weeklong protest moratorium. Abdul Hannan Masud told reporters in an online briefing late Saturday that the group’s chief, Nahid Islam, and others “must be freed, and the cases against them must be withdrawn.”

Masud, who did not disclose his location as he was hiding from authorities, also demanded that the government take “visible actions” against the ministers and police officers responsible for the deaths of protesters.

“Otherwise, Students Against Discrimination will be forced to launch tough protests” from Monday, he said.

On Friday, plainclothes detectives forcibly discharged Islam and two other senior members of the protest group from a hospital in Dhaka and took them away. Earlier in the week, Islam told AFP that he was being treated for injuries inflicted by police during a previous detention and expressed fear for his life. Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan told reporters on Friday that authorities had taken the trio into custody for their safety but did not confirm whether they had been formally arrested.

On Sunday, police told AFP that detectives had taken two more individuals into custody, while a Students Against Discrimination activist reported that a third person had been detained that morning. Prothom Alo, Bangladesh’s largest daily newspaper, reported that at least 9,000 people have been arrested nationwide since the unrest began. Although a curfew imposed last weekend remains in force, the government has progressively eased it throughout the week, signaling their confidence that order is gradually being restored.

Bangladesh restored its mobile Internet network in the afternoon, 11 days after imposing a nationwide blackout at the height of the unrest. Fixed-line broadband connections had already been restored on Tuesday, but the vast majority of Bangladesh’s 141 million Internet users rely on mobile devices to connect with the world, according to the national telecom regulator.

On Sunday, police quickly dispersed a small street rally in Dhaka that had been held to demand Hasina’s resignation.

Protests began this month over the reintroduction of a quota scheme that reserves more than half of all government jobs for certain groups. With around 18 million young Bangladeshis unemployed, according to government figures, the move deeply upset graduates facing an acute employment crisis. Critics argue that the quota is used to fill public jobs with loyalists of the ruling Awami League. Last week, the Supreme Court reduced the number of reserved jobs but did not meet protesters’ demands to eliminate the quotas.

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