Bangladesh protests demand Hasina resign, army stands ‘by the people’

Huge crowds of protesters, many wielding sticks, packed into Dhaka’s central Shahbagh Square, with street battles in multiple sites as well as in other major cities, police said.

“One of the dead was hacked in his head and another had gunshot injuries.”

Another policeman, who asked not to be named, said “the whole city has turned into a battleground”, adding a crowd of several thousand protesters torched cars and motorcycles outside a hospital.

Police and doctors reported six more deaths in the northern districts of Pabna and Rangpur, as well in Magura in the west.

Asif Mahmud, one of the main protest leaders in a nationwide civil disobedience campaign, earlier asked supporters to be ready after rallies last month were crushed by police.

“Prepare bamboo sticks and liberate Bangladesh,” he wrote on Facebook on Sunday.

Current army chief Waker-uz-Zaman spoke to officers at 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 Saturday.

The statement did not give further details or explicitly say whether the army backed the protests.

Rallies against civil service job quotas sparked days of mayhem in July that killed more than 200 people in some of the worst unrest of Hasina’s 15-year tenure.

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

On Saturday, when hundreds of thousands of protesters marched in Dhaka, the police were largely bystanders.

The protests have grown into a wider anti-government movement