Gunshot victims fill Bangladesh hospital’s morgue; internet shutdown eased

A major hospital in Bangladesh says it is overwhelmed with gunshot victims following days of student protests against a discriminatory quota system for prized government jobs, indicating the heavy use of lethal measures by security forces as they tried to quell the unrest.

The morgue of Dhaka Medical College and Hospital, the largest hospital in the capital, is filled with the bodies of 79 people killed by gunfire, its director, Brigadier General Md. Asaduzzaman, said Tuesday. 

RFA affiliate BenarNews reporters who visited the hospital’s emergency department witnessed that it was treating more than 200 gunshot victims, some of them minors. The hospital also has been besieged by people searching for missing relatives.

With all beds occupied, some patients lay on the ward floor and in the hospital’s lobby. One of the victims was 10-year old Mohammad Alif, whose left leg was injured by a gunshot.

“I did not do anything, I was playing, and suddenly a bullet broke my leg. I fell down and started crying,” he told BenarNews. “Some people took me to the hospital, doctors took out the bullet there.”

His mother Asma Begum told Benar: “I was arranging water to give him a bath, and he was playing with a fish in a jar. I did not notice when he went to the street. While I was looking for him, I got a phone call from a neighbor that he was shot.”

Separately, Bangladesh’s government eased a days-long curfew and internet blackout on Tuesday as an uneasy calm prevailed. Police said they had arrested more than 1,000 people suspected of involvement in the country’s worst unrest in more than a decade. Social media and mobile data remained throttled.

According to BenarNews tallies, at least 138 people have died in the week of clashes. Prothom Alo, Bangladesh’s national daily with reporters in every district, reported 187 deaths over the last six days, when it came back online Tuesday. 

The unrest has highlighted frustration with Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s heavy-handed grip on power.

When the government announced a nationwide curfew on July 19 and deployed the army, the secretary-general of the ruling Awami League government said security forces would operate under shoot to kill orders.  

The United Nations had previously called for restraint on both sides and the U.S. State Department on Monday condemned what it called the reported shoot-to-kill edict. 

The stage for unrest was set in June when the High Court reinstated a divisive quota that reserved 30% of civil service jobs for descendants of people who fought in the country’s 1971 war for independence from Pakistan. The ruling stirred tensions in a developing nation of some 170 million people that is failing to provide enough jobs for its burgeoning youth population.

Bangladesh’s Supreme Court on Sunday overruled the High Court and reined in the quota system so that 93% of government jobs are awarded based on merit. Relatives of freedom fighters get 5%, and the remainder is divided between ethnic minorities, individuals with disabilities and transgender people, according to the court’s ruling. 

At the Dhaka hospital, relatives and friends of rickshaw puller Goni Mia, 35, found his body at the morgue after several days of searching. 

Mojibur Rahman, a neighbor of Mia, who was waiting for the postmortem report in front of the morgue, told Benar that Mia was hit by a bullet on a roadside in Dhaka’s Nakhalpara area on Saturday. 

Mia’s death certificate, seen by Benar, said he bled to death from a gunshot wound. A photo of the body taken by a relative shows he was shot in the chest.

Benar reporters also witnessed Tofazzal Hossain searching the morgue with a photo of his 14-year-old nephew Dipu in his hand. The family heard that Dipu was injured on Friday during a clash on Chittagong Road in Dhaka, but after that, he was missing.

“Dipu just went to the street to see what's happening,” Hossain told BenarNews. 

“We have been searching for him since Friday. Today, after seeing his photos someone told us that a pedestrian took Dipu to a local hospital, and later that hospital shifted him to the DMCH.”

“We have searched for him in all wards, and finally came to the mortuary,” he said.

The opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party, meanwhile, accused the government of arresting its members en masse to divert attention from its repression of student protestors.

“By imposing a curfew, the government is now destroying the pieces of evidence of killing and attacks on unarmed people,” BNP Secretary General Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir said in a statement on Tuesday.   

Members of Students Movement Against Discrimination, a force behind the anti-quota protests, repeated a four-point “ultimatum” to the government at a press conference Tuesday with a heavy police presence. 

They want the government to resume internet services, end the curfew, ensure security for all organizers of the student movement, withdraw security forces from campuses and reopen dormitories.

Nahid Islam, a coordinator of the movement, said peaceful student protests became violent when demonstrators were attacked by the student and youth wings of the ruling party and police.

“As the law enforcement agencies failed to give security to students, we urged students … as well as all the citizens of the country to come out on the street to give security to the students,” he said.

Netblocks, a pro-democracy organization that monitors online connectivity, said fixed-line internet had been partially restored in Bangladesh after five full days offline. 

Social media and mobile data restrictions continue, “limiting the public's right to communicate and stay informed,” it said on social media site X.

BenarNews is an RFA-affiliated online news organization.