Following a nationwide internet outage, millions of Bangladeshis returned to the internet this week, and many were taken aback to witness a brutal police crackdown that they had only previously heard about from their underground bunkers. Student protests against civil service hiring regulations last month caused some of the worst unrest of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s tenure, with at least 206 deaths reported.
Hospitals told AFP that while bystanders and a few police officers were among the dead, the majority were protesters killed by police fire. The European Union and rights groups denounced what they called an excessive use of force. News broadcasts did not show much footage of the clashes between security forces and crowds, and until the national mobile internet network was restored after an 11-day outage, few people understood the full scope of the events.
Even though the disturbances have since subsided, a number of explicit amateur videos that have been posted to social media and depict police shooting protesters have stoked public discontent with Hasina’s administration. A user posted a brief video of a police officer shooting at a wounded young man while another attempted to pull him out of harm’s way. “How come the police are killing our brothers and sisters like this?” the user asked.
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