Protests continued to take place in Bangladesh on Friday (December 19) afternoon, a day after they erupted in response to the death of youth leader Sharif Osman Hadi and morphed into violence targeting newspaper houses, a prominent cultural organisation as well as an Indian consulate.
Hadi, who was a prominent face of the 2024 protests that brought down the Sheikh Hasina government, succumbed to his injuries in a hospital in Singapore on Thursday.
His body arrived in Dhaka on Friday afternoon and the interim government announced that his funeral will be held on Saturday on the parliament premises.
Dhaka has condemned the violence that has followed Hadi’s death and called on citizens to “resist all forms of mob violence committed by a few fringe elements”.
Shortly after his death was announced on Thursday, groups of protesters stormed, vandalised and set fire to the offices of leading Bengali newspaper Prothom Alo as well as the English-language Daily Star.
New Age editor Nurul Kabir too was assaulted outside the Daily Star‘s Dhaka office when he went there to speak to a crowd that vandalised the newspaper’s premises and set fire to it, bdnews24.com had reported.
Early on Friday, protesters also damaged the building of the cultural organisation Chhayanaut in Dhaka’s Dhanmondi area. An office of Hasina’s former ruling and currently banned Awami League party in Rajshahi was reportedly demolished as well.
United News of Bangladesh had reported that at least four people, including two police personnel, were injured when protesters clashed with police outside the Indian assistant high commission in Chattogram.
The interim government in Dhaka condemned the violence in a statement on Friday afternoon.
“This is a critical moment in our nation’s history when we are making a historic democratic transition. We cannot and must not allow it to be derailed by those few who thrive on chaos and reject peace,” the interim government said, referring to the upcoming general election scheduled for February 12.
Those elections and the accompanying referendum “are not merely political exercises” but a “solemn national commitment” that is “inseparable from the dream” for which Hadi ‘sacrificed his life’, the government added.
Addressing the journalists of Prothom Alo, the Daily Star and New Age – editors of the former two whom Chief Adviser Muhammad Yunus had previously spoken to over the phone – Dhaka said: “We stand with you. We are deeply sorry for the terror and violence you have endured … Attacks on journalists are attacks on truth itself. We promise you full justice.”
“We wholeheartedly condemn lynching of a Hindu man in Mymensingh. There is no space for such violence in new Bangladesh. The perpetrators of this heinous crime will not be spared,” it also said.
In a separate statement, culture adviser Mustafa Sarwar Faruquee condemned the attacks on the newspaper houses as well as Chhayanaut as “undoubtedly a conspiracy to sabotage the elections”.
“Today, we were supposed to talk about Shaheed [martyr] Osman Hadi. Today, we were supposed to be in mourning. Who has diverted the topic? Who attacked Prothom Alo, the Daily Star, Chhayanaut? Those who did it do not want a democratic transition in Bangladesh,” he was quoted as saying.
