DHAKA: At least five people were killed in nationwide clashes and trains were attacked as Bangladesh’s opposition Sunday began a strike to demand the prime minister quit and make way for polls under a caretaker government.

Police said officers opened fire at protesters in the western town of Nagarkanda after some 3,000 supporters of the main opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) ransacked a rural market and attacked police with bricks.

“We opened fire in self-defense,” district police chief Jamil Ahsan told AFP, adding that one opposition activist was killed in the firing and five were wounded. Four other people were killed elsewhere as the three-day strike got under way, with protests erupting across the country and thousands of extra police and paramilitary officers deployed.

In Dhaka opposition supporters torched buses and exploded more than a dozen home-made bombs, while police retaliated with tear gas and rubber bullets. Shops, businesses and schools were shut for fear of the violence. The BNP and its allies ordered the strike after last-minute talks between Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and opposition leader Khaleda Zia late on Saturday failed to defuse the mounting crisis.

Zia rejected Hasina’s appeal to call off the strike during a 40-minute phone conversation, believed to be the first time in at least a decade that the two “battling begums” have spoken. “Begum” is an honorific for a Muslim woman of rank.

The opposition has called the strike and protests in a bid to force Hasina’s government to resign ahead of elections due in January 2014, and set up a caretaker administration of technocrats to oversee the polls.

Zia, who has twice served as premier, has branded the government “illegal,” citing a legal provision that requires a neutral government to be set up three months before elections.