Social activists shout slogans during a nationwide strike in Dhaka yesterday.
DHAKA: Bangladesh police opened fire on opposition activists yesterday, killing one protester, on the second day of a nationwide strike over the death sentence given to a senior Islamist leader for mass murder.
Police said the shooting occurred in the western town of Mujibnagar where 1,200 stick-wielding supporters of the country’s largest Islamist party were blocking a motorway during protests over Tuesday’s sentence.
Local police chief Nahidul Alam said: “A Jamaat activist was killed in the clashes in Mujibnagar.”
At least 10 people were also injured, five protesters and five officers, after police tried to disperse the activists from the Jamaat-e-Islami party, local sub-inspector Aminur Rahman said.
“They attacked our officers, forcing us to fire with rifles, pistols and shotguns. Five protesters were injured by bullets,” Rahman said, adding that a police van was also torched.
Violence has flared throughout the country and schools and businesses have been shuttered since Jamaat called the 48-hour strike over the sentence handed to Abdul Quader Molla for crimes committed during the 1971 war of independence.
On Wednesday, the first day of the strike, an auto rickshaw driver was killed after being hit with stones thrown by rampaging protesters in the country’s south and elsewhere a police officer was shot and critically injured. The Supreme Court strengthened the sentence originally given to Molla by the country’s war crimes tribunal, and rejected an appeal for acquittal by his defence lawyers.
Molla, 65, the fourth-highest leader of Jamaat, had been given a life sentence in February by the tribunal, sparking deadly protests and riots by Islamists but also by secular activists on the other side, who considered it too lenient.
The tribunal has since January convicted six Islamists of crimes related to the 1971 war, in which pro-independence fighters battled Pakistani forces which were helped by local Islamist leaders.
The opposition has criticised the tribunal’s trials as a politically motivated exercise aimed at settling old scores rather than meting out justice. The government says three million people died during the war while independent estimates put the death toll at between 300,000 and 500,000.
AFP
