Bangladesh protesters return to the streets to demand PM’s removal

In Pictures

Thousands of Bangladeshi protesters have crowded into a central Dhaka square for mass protests, demanding Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina resign following a deadly police crackdown.

Asif Mahmud, one of the key protest leaders in a nationwide civil disobedience campaign, asked supporters to be ready to fight. “Prepare bamboo sticks and liberate Bangladesh,” he wrote on Facebook on Sunday.

While the army stepped in to help restore order in the wake of earlier protests, some former military officers have since joined the student movement, and ex-army chief General Iqbal Karim Bhuiyan turned his Facebook profile picture red in a show of support.

Army chief Waker-uz-Zaman spoke to officers at the military headquarters in Dhaka on Saturday, telling them the “Bangladesh Army is the symbol of trust of the people”.

“It always stood by the people and will do so for the sake of people and in any need of the state,” he said, according to an army statement issued late on Saturday. The statement did not give further details and did not explicitly say whether the army backed the protests.

The demonstrations began in early July over the reintroduction of the quota scheme, which reserved more than half of all government jobs for certain groups. It has since been scaled back by Bangladesh’s top court.

Rallies against the quotas led to days of mayhem that saw more than 200 people killed in some of the worst periods of unrest during Hasina’s 15-year tenure.

Troops briefly restored order but crowds returned to the streets in huge numbers this week in an all-out noncooperation movement aimed at paralysing the government.

On Saturday, when hundreds of thousands marched in Dhaka, the police were largely bystanders watching the protest