Bangladesh army personnel keep a vigil near barbed wire barricades amid a curfew following clashes between police and protestors, in Dhaka on July 22, 2024. (Photo by Munir Uz Zaman / AFP)
Dhaka: A Bangladeshi student organisation behind recent protests against government employment quotas said Monday it was halting demonstrations for 48 hours.
"We are suspending the shutdown protests for 48 hours," Nahid Islam, the top leader of main protest organiser Students Against Discrimination, told AFP from his hospital bed.
"We demand that during this period the government withdraws the curfew, restores the internet and stops targeting the student protesters."
What began as demonstrations against politicised admission quotas for sought-after government jobs has snowballed into some of the worst unrest of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina's tenure, with at least 163 people killed in clashes, according to an AFP tally.
On Sunday the country's Supreme Court pared back the hiring quotas for specific groups, including one for the children and grandchildren of "freedom fighters" from Bangladesh's 1971 liberation war against Pakistan.
"We started this movement for reforming the quota," Islam said. "But we did not want quota reform at the expense of so much blood, so much killing, so much damage to life and property."
Islam was hospitalised after being picked up by unidentified individuals he alleged were plain-clothes police on Sunday night and beaten, he said.
He blamed the actions of the authorities for the escalation of the protests.
We are not sure how many people were killed. The government is completely controlling the media," he said.
"People are expressing their anger at the government."
