Dhaka: Hundreds of policemen in riot gear yesterday fired tear gas in the Bangladeshi capital Dhaka as political violence that broke out on Saturday continued during a day-long general strike, officers and witnesses said.
Police patrolled streets as main opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) enforced a nationwide general strike protesting the overnight "eviction" of their leader and former prime minister Khalida Zia from her residence.
The stoppage forced closure of shops, businesses and schools in all the major cities while millions of people were stranded as they planned to visit their village homes ahead of Wednesday's Eid Al Adha as transport operators suspended inter-district services to evade the wrath of opposition activists.
Witnesses said baton-wielding policemen chased demonstrators who pelted vehicles with stones for defying the strike call and for setting fire on a police van at the downtown Sadarghat river port terminal.
Clashes
Police said they arrested nearly two dozen opposition activists in sporadic incidents of clashes when the pickets also set a police motorcycle on fire at central Bangla Motor area.
"The people have lost their confidence in the government and spontaneously observing the ‘hartal' across the country," BNP secretary general Khandakar Delwar Hossain told newsmen in front of the party's Central office at Naya Paltan where the central leaders staged street rallies.
Hours after her eviction from her residence, which was allotted to her under a controversial lease agreement 29 years ago after her husband president Ziaur Rahman's assassination and where she lived for the past 40 years, Zia told newsmen that she was humiliatingly dragged out of the house.
"I was driven out of the house... I feel harassed, humiliated and ashamed of the way I was thrown out of the house," she said at the briefing at her Gulshan office last night. She called an army statement that claimed that she voluntarily vacated the house as "totally false".
