Two separate mob violence incidents chill Bangladesh

Dhaka: Bangladesh on Friday witnessed two chilling incidents of violence when an Islamist mob burnt the corpse of a spiritual figure desecrating his grave, while another group set on fire the central office of Jatiya Party, an ally of deposed prime minister Sheikh Hasina’s Awami League.

Police and media reports said a group of people claiming to be Muslim “monotheistic mass” burnt the body of Nura Pagla, known as a Sufi dervish, nearly two weeks after his death, desecrating his grave, exhuming the corpse and vandalising his shrine in western Rajbari district after Friday prayers.

A subsequent clash between Pagla’s followers and the Islamists left one person dead and over 100 wounded when vehicles of police and that of the local administrative chief were set on fire.

Officials said at least 22 people received treatment at the local government health complex while four were referred to a better health facility at neighbouring Faridpur as their wounds were critical.

The incident prompted Chief Adviser Muhammad Yunus’s office to issue a statement vowing tough actions against the perpetrators of the attack, calling the incident “inhuman and despicable”.

In the second incident, the Jatiya Party (JP) office in the Purana Paltan area of Dhaka was set ablaze on Friday evening, a week after Gono Odhikar Parishad leader Nurul Haque Nur was critically wounded during when military troops came in aid of police forces, which were attacked by the activists of the group.

Gono Odhikar Parishad is a group aligned to last year’s violent movement dubbed as July Uprising that had toppled Hasina’s government on August 5, 2024.

The army and police dispersed the activists with batons and bamboo sticks last week but the security forces action drew harsh reaction on the next day when an official statement of the Bangladesh interim government” called it “brutal”.

“Such acts of violence are an assault not only on Mr Nur but also on the spirit of the democratic movement that brought the nation together in its historic struggle for justice and accountability,” the statement read.

Dhaka police attributed Friday evening’s act of arson to the same group but its general secretary Rashed Khan declined the allegation and said “we do not know who carried out the attack”.

But Khan simultaneously said that JP was an Awami League ally and “complicit in genocide”, an apparent reference to last year’s bloody movement, and added that the situation could have been averted if the government banned the party and arrested its chairman G M Quader.

"Police lobbed three sound grenades and used water cannons to disperse the Gono Odhikar Parishad activists," Deputy Police Commissioner Masud Alam told reporters.

According to private UNB news agency, activists of former prime minister Khaleda Zia’s Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), Jamaat-e-Islami and its allied groups took part in a rally near the scene prior to the attack.

The incident, however, did not draw any reaction from the interim government or Yunus’s office.

Unlike last Friday, the military troops kept them away from the scene of violence.