DHAKA: Bangladesh’s main opposition party said on Friday that three more of its senior leaders had been arrested, after Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina ruled out talks with adversaries demanding her resignation.

Hasina has been accused of ruling the South Asian nation with an iron fist and the United States has sanctioned some of its most senior police figures for widespread human rights violations.

Hundreds of senior cadres and supporters of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) have been arrested, with former commerce minister Amir Khosru Mahmud Chowdhury among those taken into custody overnight.

“Police arrested my dad from my aunt’s home in Gulshan at around midnight,” Chowdhury’s son Israfil Khosru said.

The party also confirmed the arrests of BNP spokesman Zahir Uddin Swapan and Aminul Huq, a former national football captain and a Dhaka unit chief of the party. The latest arrests come just days after police detained Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir, one of the BNP’s highest-ranked leaders.

Garment workers strike halts production at factories making clothes for major global brands

Alamgir was charged with the murder of a police officer who was killed during clashes between security forces and opposition activists on Saturday. He and Chowdhury have helped lead the party since the 2018 jailing of former prime minister Khaleda Zia, with her son and heir apparent exiled in London.

Police have yet to comment on the latest arrests but said in an earlier statement that at least 2,113 people had been arrested over the past week on charges of violence during opposition protests.

Hasina again ruled out any dialogue with the BNP in an address to parliament on Thursday. “Who would ask for talks with these beasts?” she said, in a speech that also accused her adversary Zia’s son of hiring killers to murder her.

Global brands suffer

A garment union leader said in Dhaka on Friday Levi’s and H&M are among top global clothing brands to suffer production halts in Bangladesh due to a strike by garment workers.

Dozens of factories have been ransacked by striking workers, with several hundred others shuttered by their owners.

Among them are “many of the country’s bigger factories, who make clothing for almost all major Western brands and retailers,” Kalpona Akter, president of the Bangladesh Garments and Industrial Workers Federation (BGIWF), said.

“They include Gap, Walmart, H&M, Zara, Inditex, Bestseller, Levi’s, Marks and Spencer, Primark and Aldi,” she added.

Published in Dawn, November 4th, 2023