Bangladesh opposition stages protests as it challenges PM Hasina

Rafiqul Islam has joined tens of thousands of opposition supporters in the capital Dhaka after travelling nearly 200km (124 miles) from the southern coastal district of Noakhali. But he had to fake his identity to evade detention ahead of the anti-government rally, Qazet.az reports.

The police in the South Asian nation had arrested hundreds of supporters from the main opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), which had called for the rally to protest against price rises and demand the resignation of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina.

“I had deleted my messenger and logged into a second Facebook account in my phone. We were told by the central command of our party to do so to reach Dhaka without getting arrested or harassed,” Islam, a grassroots-level activist of BNP, told Al Jazeera,

“It apparently worked,” Islam said as he was standing amid a sea of people at Golapbagh field in central Dhaka on Saturday morning. It was BNP’s last of a series of rallies organised across the country in the past weeks to demand new elections under a neutral caretaker government.

From the Dhaka rally, BNP’s top leadership renewed that call along with the demands for withdrawals of cases against its party chief Khaleda Zia and her son Tarique Rahman — both of whom were charged and convicted in what the party says are “politically motivated cases”.

All seven BNP legislators announced their resignations from the current parliament in protest against what they said was the “illegal” government led by the ruling Awami League (AL) party.