Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina resigned Monday amid protests in the South Asian country, media reports said.
Hasina, 76, took office for her fourth straight five-year term as the country’s prime minister in January this year after her ruling Bangladesh Awami League (AL) party won a landslide victory in the parliamentary elections.
Bangladesh’s prime minister has resigned and reportedly fled the country amid deadly clashes with protesters, the BBC reports.
The anti-government protests, which have been building for weeks, ended up in the official residence of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina in the capital of Dhaka, calling for her resignation.
The protest was defying a military-ordered curfew after a weekend of violence that left about 100 people dead.
The protests began peacefully as frustrated students demanded an end to a quota system for government jobs, but the demonstrations have since morphed into an unprecedented challenge and uprising against Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and her ruling Awami League party.
The government has attempted to quell the violence with force, leaving nearly 300 people dead and fuelling further outrage and calls for Hasina to step down.
At least 95 people, including at least 14 police officers, died in clashes in the capital on Sunday, according to the country’s leading Bengali-language daily newspaper, Prothom Alo. Hundreds more were injured in the violence.
Authorities first shut off mobile internet on Sunday in an attempt to quell the unrest, while the broadband internet stopped working from late Monday morning.
This is the second internet blackout in the country after the protests turned deadly in July.
On Monday, after three hours of suspension of broadband services, both broadband and mobile internet returned.
The military-imposed curfew went into effect Sunday night and covered Dhaka and other divisional and district headquarters.
The government had earlier imposed a curfew with some exceptions in the capital and elsewhere.
The government also announced a holiday from Monday to Wednesday. Courts were to be closed indefinitely. Mobile internet service was cut off, and Facebook and messaging apps, including WhatsApp, were inaccessible on Monday.
More to come.
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