Night-time police raids spread fear across Dhaka in unrest aftermath

Many residents of Dhaka said they were in fear as Bangladesh police personnel conducted night-time raids after shutting off the electricity, while hunting down opposition members and supporters the government blames for last week’s deadly civil unrest.

According to a student anti-quota protest leader, the police also arrested students injured during the unrest in a swoop on a Dhaka hospital.

Dhaka Metropolitan Police’s joint commissioner Biplob Kumar Sarker told reporters that more than 2,300 people had been arrested in Dhaka alone as of Friday afternoon.

“Analyzing the CC [closed-circuit] camera footage, other pieces of evidence and information provided by intelligence agencies, police are arresting the people who were involved in vandalism,” he told reporters at his office.  

Leading Bangladesh daily Prothom Alo reported that more than 5,500 people had been arrested nationwide.

Saleha Begum, a shopkeeper in the Arjatpara area of Dhaka, said she heard some boys were taken by the police and soldiers from different houses on Thursday evening.

“Now the situation is such that whoever has a young son in his house is in panic,” she told BenarNews.

“Security forces turned up around 9.00 pm and ordered shops to close and told people to go home. Then their drive started,” she said.

“They took over the roads in the area and the electricity was turned off.”

Meanwhile, the trio allegedly picked up by the police from the hospital were key leaders of the student movement that organized protests against discriminatory quotas for government jobs, another student leader, Sarjis Alam, told BenarNews.

He alleged that two of the students, Nahid Islam and Asif Mahmud, were receiving treatment at Dhaka’s Gonoshasthaya Nagar Hospital for serious injuries inflicted during a period of apparent enforced disappearance.

Harun-or-Rashid, chief of the metropolitan police’s detective wing, told BenarNews he had not heard of the hospital arrests.

Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and law enforcement agencies blame students and the opposition for the deadliest unrest in Bangladesh in more than a decade. According to Prothom Alo, at least 197 people were killed.

The student protest leaders, however, have said they were attacked by security forces and pro-government groups such as the ruling party’s youth and student wings.

The U.N. and human rights groups have condemned the authorities' use of lethal force against the protestors.

“We have been alarmed by the large number of unlawful killings, possible enforced disappearances, torture and the detention of thousands of people,” a group of United Nations human rights rapporteurs and experts said in a statement Thursday.

To regain public trust, the government needs to take responsibility and ensure a credible process of investigation and accountability to hold perpetrators to account, the 19 experts said.

“We are going through an anxious time,” said Sharifuudin Ahmed, a university student, whose Dhaka neighborhood was raided by security forces.

“It seems that we are in a war situation.”