Street clashes broke out in Bangladesh on Friday as Islamic activists defied emergency rule to protest over a major newspaper's publication of a cartoon deemed offensive to Muslims.
Thousands of protesters joined the rally in the center of the capital Dhaka, even though demonstrations are strictly prohibited under the country's eight-month-old state of emergency.
Police baton-charged some of the activists as they tried to break through barricades put up to prevent them reaching the offices of Prothom Alo, the newspaper that published the cartoon and Bangladesh's biggest daily paper.
PHOTO: EPA
ANGER
Demonstrators chanted slogans demanding the execution of newspaper editor Matiur Rahman and burned effigies of him and copies of the Bengali-language daily.
"More than 9,000 people protested against the cartoon in front of the national mosque and tried to march to the Prothom Alo office," a police official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
A doctor at the city's main hospital said five people had been treated for "very minor" injuries.
The cartoon appeared in Prothom Alo's weekly satirical magazine Alpin.
Its cartoonist, Arisur Rahman, 23, was detained earlier this week and later remanded in custody by a court.
APOLOGIES
Matiur Rahman on Thursday apologized for the cartoon, which showed a small boy adding the name Mohammed to the name of a cat.
International press freedom body Reporters Without Borders called for the immediate release of the cartoonist.
The protests came as Bangladesh's military-backed emergency government seized copies of another magazine for allegedly insulting Islam.
"The government has banned the Eid issue of the Bengali language weekly magazine Shaptahik 2000 for publishing an autobiographical article where the writer desecrated the holy shrine Mecca," said Shahenur Mia, senior information officer at the home affairs ministry.
Mia declined to elaborate, but the Daily Inqilab newspaper said the author, Daud Haider, who has lived in Germany for 30 years, compared Mecca to a brothel in India.
"The government has ordered the seizure of all copies of this issue of the magazine," Mia said.
Bangladesh, with a population of 144 million, is the world's third-largest Muslim-majority country.
It has been under emergency rule since Jan. 11 after elections were canceled over vote-rigging allegations and an army-backed government took power.
`BADLY MARRED'
The temporary government has promised to reinstate democracy by holding fresh elections late next year after cleaning up the nation's corrupt politics.
Last month Reporters Without Borders criticized the government for being heavy handed towards the media.
It said its record had been "badly marred" by censorship and violence by security forces against journalists during a spate of unrest.
ROCKY RELATIONS: The figures on residents come as Chinese tourist numbers drop following Beijing’s warnings to avoid traveling to Japan The number of Chinese residents in Japan has continued to rise, even as ties between the two countries have become increasingly fractious, data released on Friday showed. As of the end of December last year, the number of Chinese residents had increased by 6.5 percent from the previous year to 930,428. Chinese people accounted for 22.6 percent of all foreign residents in Japan, making them by far the largest group, Japanese Ministry of Justice data showed. Beijing has criticized Tokyo in increasingly strident terms since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi last year suggested that a military conflict around Taiwan could
A pro-Iran hacking group claimed to breach FBI Director Kash Patel’s personal e-mail inbox and posted some of the contents online. The e-mails provided by the hacking group include travel details, correspondence with leasing agents in Washington and global entry, and loyalty account numbers. The e-mail address the hackers claim to have compromised has been previously tied to Patel’s personal details, and the leaked e-mails contain photos of Patel and others, in addition to correspondence with family members and colleagues. “The FBI is aware of malicious actors targeting Director Patel’s personal email information,” the agency said in a statement on
RIVALRY: ‘We know that these are merely symbolic investigations initiated by China, which is in fact the world’s most profligate disrupter of supply chains,’ a US official said China has started a pair of investigations into US trade practices, retaliating against similar probes by US President Donald Trump’s administration as the superpowers stake out positions before an expected presidential summit in May. The move, announced by the Chinese Ministry of Commerce on Friday, is a direct mirror of steps Trump took to revive his tariff agenda after the US Supreme Court last month struck down some of his duties. “China expresses its strong dissatisfaction and firm opposition to these actions,” a ministry spokesperson said in a statement, referring to the so-called Section 301 investigations initiated on March 11.
When a hiker fell from a 55m waterfall in wild New Zealand bush, rescuers were forced to evacuate the badly hurt woman without her dog, which could not be found. After strangers raised thousands of dollars for a search, border collie Molly was flown to safety by a helicopter pilot who was determined to reunite the pet and the owner. A week earlier, an emergency rescue helicopter found the woman with bruises and lacerations after a fall at a rocky spot at the waterfall on the South Island’s West Coast. She was airlifted on March 24, but they were forced to
RSS