At least five demonstrators were killed in Bangladesh on Tuesday during violent clashes between rival student groups over quotas for coveted government jobs, police said, a day after more than 400 others were injured.
Police fired tear gas and rubber bullets as university students battled with counter-protesters backing the ruling Awami League party, fighting with sticks and hurling rocks.
The violence marks an escalation in efforts to hinder a determined weekslong campaign of sit-in protests and street marches that has ignored calls by Bangladesh’s prime minister and top court for students to return to class.
Three people were killed in the port city of Chittagong.
“All three had bullet injuries,” Chittagong Medical College Hospital director Mohammad Taslim Uddin told AFP.
“Some 35 people were injured.”
Rival student groups marched in several key locations around the capital Dhaka, some throwing bricks at each other, with traffic in the city of 20 million almost ground to a halt.
A student was killed outside Dhaka College, inspector Bacchu Mia told AFP, adding at least 60 people were also injured.
In the northern city of Rangpur, police commissioner Mohammad Moniruzzaman told AFP that a student had been killed in clashes.
He did not give details as to how the student died but said police had fired rubber bullets and tear gas to disperse protesters.
Rangpur Medical College hospital director Yunus Ali said the “student was brought dead to the hospital by other students”, adding that “his body had injury marks”.
Tauhidul Haque Siam, a student reporter from the city’s Rokeya University, told AFP that ruling party supporters had attacked anti-quota protesters, while police fired rubber pellets from shotguns.
“Police opened fire from their shotguns on the protesters,” Siam said, adding he had been injured.
He said the dead student had been “killed in the firing”, but it was not possible to verify his account.
As the day wore on and with some key highways blocked by the protesters, the authorities deployed the paramilitary Border Guard Bangladesh (BGB) force in five major cities, including Dhaka and Chittagong.
They had been tasked with controlling “the law and order situation in view of the quota protests”, a BGB spokesperson said.
Near-daily marches this month have demanded an end to a quota system that reserves more than half of civil service posts for specific groups, including children of heroes from the country’s 1971 independence.
Critics say the scheme benefits children of pro-government groups that back Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, 76, who won her fourth consecutive election in January after a vote without genuine opposition.
Tuesday’s clashes came a day after confrontations between anti-quota demonstrators and members of the ruling Awami League’s student wing that left more than 400 people injured in Dhaka.
Amnesty International afterwards urged Bangladesh to “immediately guarantee the safety of all peaceful protesters”.
US State Department spokesman Matthew Miller also denounced the “violence against peaceful protesters”, prompting a rebuke from Bangladesh’s foreign ministry.
