DHAKA: A Bangladeshi student group vowed on Sunday to resume protests that have sparked a deadly police crackdown and nationwide unrest until several of their leaders are released from custody.
Last week's violence killed at least 205 people, according to police and hospital figures, in one of the biggest upheavals of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina's 15-year tenure.
Army patrols and a nationwide curfew remain in place more than a week later, and a police dragnet has scooped up thousands of protesters, including at least half a dozen student leaders.
Members of Students Against Discrimination, whose campaign against civil service job quotas sparked unrest, announced they would suspend their week-long protest.
Abdul Hannan Masood told reporters in an online briefing late Saturday that the group's chief, Nahid Islam, and others “should be released and the cases against them withdrawn.”
Masood, who did not disclose his location because he was hiding from the authorities, also demanded “visible action” against government ministers and police officers responsible for the deaths of the protesters.
“Otherwise, students will start a strong protest against discrimination from Monday,” he said.
Islam and two other senior members of the opposition group were forcibly discharged from a hospital in the capital Dhaka on Friday and taken away by a group of plainclothes detectives.
Earlier in the week, Islam told AFP that he was being treated in hospital and feared for his life after police injured him in an earlier stage of detention.
Interior Minister Asaduzzaman Khan told reporters on Friday that the trio had been detained for their own protection but did not confirm whether they had been formally arrested.
Police told AFP on Sunday that detectives had detained two others, while a student anti-discrimination activist told AFP that a third had been taken away on Sunday morning.
At least 9,000 people have been arrested across the country since the unrest began, according to Pratham Alo, Bangladesh's largest daily newspaper.
While the curfew imposed last weekend remains in place, it has gradually eased this week in a sign of the Hasina government's confidence that order is slowly being restored.
Telecommunications Minister Junaid Ahmed Palak told reporters that the country's mobile internet network would be restored later Sunday, 11 days after a nationwide blackout imposed at the height of the unrest.
Fixed-line broadband connections were restored earlier on Tuesday but the vast majority of Bangladesh's 141 million internet users depend on their mobile devices to connect to the world, according to the national telecommunications regulator.
The protests began this month after the re-introduction of a quota scheme that reserved more than half of government jobs for certain groups.
About 18 million young Bangladeshis are out of work, according to government figures, a move that has deeply hurt graduates who are facing an acute employment crisis.
Critics say quotas are used to stack public jobs with loyalists of the ruling Awami League.
The Supreme Court last week reduced the number of reserved jobs but failed in the protestors' demand to scrap the quota altogether.
Hasina has ruled Bangladesh since 2009 and won her fourth consecutive election in January without a real opposition.
His government has been accused by rights groups of abusing state institutions to seize power and ousting dissent, including extrajudicial killings of opposition activists.
The protests were largely peaceful until police and pro-government student groups attacked demonstrators last week.
