B'desh opposition to organise protest rallies tomorrow

Bangladesh's opposition party BNP and its allies have announced fresh protest rallies tomorrow across the country to push for the postponement of elections after its three-day strike ended today leaving 21 people dead.
The party will hold one such rally at Suhrawardy Udyan in capital Dhaka at 3pm, BNP Joint Secretary General Ruhul Kabir Rizvi told reporters here.
The ruling Awami League and BNP are at loggerheads over the system for conducting the polls. Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has formed a multi-party interim set-up while the BNP wants elections under a non-party interim government.
The opposition led by BNP is demanding that the polls scheduled for January 5 should be shelved until the dispute over the poll-time government is settled.

Police said they have recorded 21 deaths during the opposition-enforced three-day strike. Dhaka Medical College Hospital has reported the death of the last victim, saying one of the severely burnt bus passengers succumbed to his wounds.
Doctors at the state-run facility said the teenage boy died last night while conditions of 18 others were critical.

"We cannot consider anyone of them to be out of danger... the fire burnt 15 to 50 per cent of their bodies and damaged their respiratory systems," head of the burn unit Professor Samanta Lal Sen told newsmen.
BNP, which ended the blockade at 5 am today, denied allegations of setting the bus on fire, attributing the act to government supporters as state minister for home Shamsul Haque Tuku called the arsonists "animals in human disguise."

Police said they suspected the miscreants used gun powders or petrol bomb to torch the bus while the wounded passengers said the packed vehicle caught fire after "something" landed in it from outside.
The mass circulation Samakal and several other newspapers said of the 21 casualties, seven died of burn wounds caused by petrol bombs or arson in vehicles during the past three days when hundreds others, mostly ordinary people, were injured.
"We condemn this politics (of destruction), so should all do who love Bangladesh," the Daily Star newspaper wrote in a front-page editorial while the Prothom Alo carried another front-page commentary questioning "what crime the ordinary people committed".

Meanwhile, Chief Election Commissioner Kazi Rakibuddin Ahmed yesterday said the plans for the scheduled January 5 polls could be revised if the feuding major parties reached a consensus on election time as "everything is possible if they reached a settlement in the peoples' interest."
But he said the commission was still proceeding with the plans to hold the elections on January 5.
Hasina, who also heads the AL, yesterday told a party meeting that the polls would be held in due time and urged the countrymen to cast their votes for continued democratic process.
According to media reports, political violence this year have so far killed 348 people.