DHAKA: Bangladeshi police have discharged from hospital and arrested the leaders of a student protest that sparked nationwide unrest last week as security forces clashed with demonstrators.
Since early July, students have been demonstrating against rules that reserve most government jobs to descendants of those who fought in the country's 1971 liberation war.
At least 209 people have been killed and thousands injured, according to a count based on local media reports since protests turned violent last week.
Most of the casualties were reported in Dhaka, where intense clashes broke out between protesters, government supporters, police and paramilitary forces as the country was cut off for six days.
Among those injured were student leaders Naheed Islam and Asif Mahmood, coordinators of Students Against Discrimination, the protest's main organizing group. They were patients of Gonashastia Hospital in Dhaka from where they were arrested by the Detective Branch of the Dhaka Metropolitan Police on Friday evening. Another student leader who attended Islam and Mahmoud, Abu Baker Majumder, was also detained.
Detective chief Haroon Or-Rashid told reporters in Dhaka on Saturday that the trio had been detained “for security reasons” as their families were worried about their safety.
“We took them into custody to keep them safe,” he said.
The student leaders were arrested by a team of more than a dozen plainclothes officers despite objections from medical staff, a hospital worker told Arab News.
“At first, we tried to make them understand that without appropriate protocols, admitted patients cannot be discharged from the hospital. Later, they spoke with our authorities, and the students were taken away from the hospital. We could not keep them any longer,” said a hospital employee on condition of anonymity.
“The health of the students was not very good… Asif had low blood pressure and Nahid had blood clots and bruises on different parts of his body. Both required further treatment.”
The arrests followed a crackdown by police in Dhaka, where a curfew imposed last week was still in effect.
Litan Kumar Saha, the joint commissioner of the Dhaka Metropolitan Police, said 2,284 people were arrested in Dhaka in clashes related to the protests, during which many administrative offices were set on fire.
“We analyze the pictures of various places and establish the identities of the attackers. If we receive confirmation of someone's involvement in anarchy, we conduct operations to detain them. It was conducted transparently and we are checking the people who participated in the sabotage,” he told Arab News.
“In the last 24 hours, 245 people were arrested in Dhaka. Our work will continue until the situation normalizes.”
International human rights groups have repeatedly expressed concern over Bangladesh's handling of the protests, with Amnesty International saying that witness statements, as well as video and photographs, “confirm the use of unlawful force by the police against student protesters”.
The protests erupted after the High Court upheld a controversial quota system in which 56 percent of civil service jobs were reserved for certain groups, including women, marginalized communities, children and grandchildren of freedom fighters, for whom the government allocates 30 percent of messages.
Last week, the Supreme Court slashed the quota system, ordering 93 percent of government jobs to be distributed on the basis of merit.
