DHAKA, 23 August 2007 — The army-backed interim government clamped an indefinite curfew on capital Dhaka and five other divisional headquarters with effect from 8 p.m. last night amid escalating student rioting across Bangladesh.
The curfew was imposed in view of a complete breakdown of the law and order situation in the country yesterday.
In an urgent order, the interim regime also shut down sine die all the universities in the country and colleges in the six divisional cities of Dhaka, Chittagong, Rajshahi, Khulna, Sylhet and Barisal.
The students were asked to vacate their respective dormitories by 8 p.m. last night to quell the fast-spreading violent student protests across the country.
Earlier, chief adviser Fakhruddin Ahmed chaired a high-level emergency meeting at his office in Dhaka in the afternoon to review the overall situation, as more and more campuses turned into veritable battlefields on the third day of the violence triggered from the Dhaka University campus where students were protesting the presence of police during a soccer match..
All eight private television channels stopped showing footage of the violence and mobile telephone networks went down after the curfew came into effect. “We request channels to stop televising footage of violence until further order because this might instigate further violence,” an official told reporters.
There was no official comment concerning the disruption of the six cell phone operators serving around 20 million users. Police and witnesses said a rickshaw puller was killed after he was caught in clashes at a university in Rajshahi.
