Television news channels in Bangladesh went off the air on Friday as violent student protests against government job quotas continued, killing nearly two dozen people this week.
There were fresh episodes of violence in parts of the country on Friday, with police using tear gas to disperse protesters, a witness said.
Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina's government “was forced” to call in the army on Thursday night to help “maintain order,” India's foreign minister said. Economic times The newspaper reported.
Although the protests were sparked by student anger against the controversial quota system, some analysts have said tough economic conditions, including high inflation, rising unemployment and depleting foreign reserves, were adding fuel to the fire. Reuters reported.
The protests have also opened up old and delicate political divisions between those who fought in the 1971 Bangladesh war.
Authorities had cut some mobile phone services on Thursday to try to quell the unrest, but the disruption spread across the country by Friday morning, witnesses in Dhaka and New Delhi said.
Telephone calls from abroad mostly failed to connect and calls over the Internet could not be completed.
The websites of several Bangladesh-based newspapers were not updated on Friday morning and their social media accounts were also not active.
News TV channels and state broadcasters cable TV They were off the air while entertainment channels continued their normal broadcasting, a witness said.
Hacked websites
The streets of the capital, Dhaka, were deserted on Friday, which is a weekly public holiday in the country.
There was little traffic and very few rickshaw drivers on the streets and few crowds near a vegetable and fish market, he said, adding that a protest rally had been called at the main mosque at around 0800 GMT.
The official websites of Bangladesh's central bank, prime minister's office and police appear to have been hacked by a group calling itself “THE R3SISTANC3”, which said: “It's no longer a protest, it's a war now.”
The national unrest, the biggest since Hasina was re-elected earlier this year, has been fuelled by high youth unemployment. Nearly a fifth of the country's 170 million people are neither employed nor in education.
Hasina's government had scrapped the quota system in 2018, but a top court reinstated it last month. The government appealed the verdict and the Supreme Court stayed the high court's order, pending the hearing of the government's appeal on August 7.
