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Bangladesh PM Hasina resigns, flies off to India in military helicopter: Reports

Sulaiman Umar
05 Aug, 2024
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Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina resigned from her post Monday, as per multiple sources, including from the army, high commission in Delhi and media outlets. She took off in a military helicopter to India.

Thousands of Bangladeshi protesters stormed the palace of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina in Dhaka, with a source telling AFP she had fled mass demonstrations demanding she quit.

Bangladesh's Channel 24 broadcast images of crowds running into the premier's official residence in the capital, waving to the camera as they celebrated.

Visuals broadcast on Bangladeshi TV channels showed protesters storming Hasina's palace, overturning furniture, smashing glass door panels, and carrying off books and other items including a live chicken.

"I am inside the Ganabhaban Palace," Bangladeshi journalist Yeasir Arafat told AFP. "There are more than 1,500 people inside the palace. They are breaking furniture and glasses".

A source close to Hasina told AFP that the 76-year-old had left Dhaka with her sister for "a safer place", adding that she had "wanted to record a speech but she could not get an opportunity to do that".

Earlier, French news agency AFP reported that the PM's resignation is a "possibility", as six more people were killed in some of the worst violence since the birth of the South Asian nation more than five decades ago.

"You see, the situation is very volatile. What is happening, I myself don’t know," Law Minister Anisul Huq told Reuters.

Student activists had called for a march to the capital Dhaka on Monday in defiance of a nationwide curfew to press Hasina to resign, a day after deadly clashes across the country killed nearly 100 people.

Internet access in Bangladesh was widely restricted on Monday, service providers and monitors said, a day after the deadliest demonstrations in more than a month of anti-government protests.

The overall death toll from clashes in Bangladesh has risen to at least 300 people, after 94 died Sunday in the deadliest day in weeks of anti-government demonstrations, according to an AFP tally.

culled from Khaleej Times