Dhaka: A Dhaka court has sent a senior lawmaker of the main opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) to jail over charges of attempts to provoke a communal riot over an Islamist group’s deadly Dhaka siege campaign earlier this month.
“Mr M.K. Anwar, MP, was sent to jail to face charges of instigating communal riots,” a court official said hours after he surrendered before the metropolitan magistrate court on a case filed by a leader of the ruling Awami League’s volunteers’ wing.
Anwar’s lawyer Masoud Ahmad told newsmen his client appeared before the court to have a previous bail order extended but the magistrate ordered him to be sent to prison after rejecting his petition.
Awami League volunteers’ wing leader Debashish Biswas filed the case against Anwar calling his statement “false, fabricated and derogatory” and an attempt to “destroy communal harmony.”
The newly formed group Hefazat-e-Islam enforced a Dhaka siege on May 5, sparking violence that left at least 21 people dead in Dhaka and its outskirts besides the southeastern port city of Chittagong.
A bureaucrat-turned-politician, Anwar claimed at a news briefing after the violence on May 6 that the law-enforcement and paramilitary forces accompanied by ruling Awami League activists killed “several thousand religious leaders and scholars”. He also claimed that a leader of the ruling Awami League belonging to the minority Hindu community led the arson incidents and attacks at the Baitul Mukarram Mosque complex.
Civil society figures and rights groups widely criticised the comments as “highly provocative” and suggested they were aimed at causing political anarchy, prompting a Dhaka court to order his arrest.
