Bomb attacks, especially during Saturday’s pre-shutdown demonstrations across the country, were planned and carried out to foil the opposition movement, the BNP’s Acting Secretary General Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir has claimed.
Crude bombs rocked police and RAB offices, residences of Ministers and Judges and even media offices on Saturday, the day before the opposition’s 60-hour strike began at 6am on Sunday.
A private TV channel journalist was badly wounded in the leg in one of the explosions.
Bomb blasts also marked the first day of the opposition-backed shutdown on Sunday.
Opposition spokesperson Alamgir briefed journalist at his party’s Naya Paltan headquarters on Sunday afternoon, amid deepening public concern over blasts.
“This is a dubious effort by government agents to ruin the ongoing movement and democracy to avoid holding the national election under a non-party government,” said Alamgir.
He condemned the attacks on newspaper offices and vehicles involved in news gathering. He urged his party activists and leaders to foil such actions.
Within 15 minutes of Alamgir’s press meet, a hand-made bomb went off at the Nightingle intersection close to the BNP’s Naya Paltan office at around 5pm.
Alamgir said students sitting for their ‘O’ level exams, Hajj pilgrims returning home, and the Bangladesh-New Zealand cricket series had been exempted from shutdown.
The BNP-led 18-party opposition alliance is enforcing its 60-hour countrywide strike, ignoring a telephone call from Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina to BNP chief Khaleda Zia, appealing for the withdrawal of the strike and a dialogue to fix the format of an all-party poll-time government.
Alamgir doubted the AL’s intention to really solve the crisis through talks.
According to him, over 600 opposition leaders and activists had been arrested on the first day of the shutdown and nearly 1,500 strike supporters injured, while police implicated 15,000 opposition activists in vandalism and arson cases.
Mobile courts have penalized 12 people on different charges during the shutdown.
Alamgir has claimed three of their activists had been killed by the ruling AL’s associate bodies – Bangladesh Chhatra League and Jubo League.
He demanded that the police ban on meetings, rallies, processions and human chains be immediately lifted.
The BNP’s Joint Secretary General Ruhul Kabor Rizvi alleged, though opposition activists were being prevented from taking out processions, the ruling party leaders and activists were doing so under police protection.
Reply to criticisms against general strikes to press home a political agenda, Rizvi claimed his party opted for shutdown only for 16 to 17 days, except the one being currently enforced.
The AL on the other hand had been on strike for 173 days while it was in the opposition in 1995-96.
Source: bdnews24
