Hartal Tuesday; many top BNP leaders picked up

 

Police detain BNP acting secretary general Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir and joint secretary general Ruhul Kabir Rizvi Ahmed from party headquarters at Nayapaltan in the capital on Monday. Photo: Amran Hossain

Police picked up many top BNP leaders including its acting secretary general Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir and Opposition Chief Whip Zainul Abdin Farroque from their party headquarters on Monday evening.
The other detained leaders include former home minister Altaf Hossain Chowdhury, former Dhaka city
corporation mayor Sadeque Hossain Khoka, BNP’s joint secretaries general Ruhul Kabir Rizvi Ahmed and Amanullah Aman and the party’s Dhaka city unit member secretary Abdus Salam.
The law enforcers also picked up more than 70 leaders and activists raiding the Nayapaltan office in the capital. All the office staff were also detained during the raid.
Police recovered six cocktails from the BNP office.
The raid came less than an hour after the BNP-led 18-party opposition alliance called a dawn-to-dusk nationwide hartal for Tuesday.
A police team entered the BNP’s office around 6:00pm and picked up the opposition leaders and activists.
Earlier around 4:45pm, a rally was foiled after five cocktails went off at the Nightingale intersection, some yards from the venue in front of the Nayapaltan headquarters of the main opposition BNP.
The opposition leaders announced the hartal when the leaders and activists started running helter-skelter in the area.
The alliance organised the rally on Monday afternoon protesting the ‘mass killings by police and governing party activists’.
Police fired rubber bullets and lobbed teargas canisters to disperse the opposition activists who were staging protests.
The agitators set fire to two motorcycles.
A huge number of law enforcers including police, Rapid Action Battalion (Rab), and armed police had cordoned off the rally which started 4:15pm.
Presided over by Dhaka city unit BNP convenor Sadek Hossain Khoka, Shibir leader Yasir Arafat addressed the rally.
Apart from BNP activists, a large number of Jamaat-Shibir activists have also joined the rally bearing placards demanding release if their top leaders who are now facing trial for crimes against humanity in country’s Liberation War in 1971.
Meanwhile, the local BNP leaders have decided to enforce the strike in Thakurgaon, home district of Fakhrul, from this evening protesting his arrest.