Bangladesh's main opposition leader Sheikh Hasina, who survived a grenade attack that killed 20 people in Dhaka last month, urged Bangladeshis on Sunday to join her in a campaign to force the government out.
Seven grenades exploded at a rally of her Awami League on August 21 just after Hasina, a former prime minister, had finished speaking to supporters. The blasts wounded at least 150 people, many of whom are still in hospital.
Hasina, making her first public appearance on Sunday since the attack, called for a countrywide strike on October 10 to protest against "growing lawlessness".
She said the government of Prime Minister Begum Khaleda Zia had "totally failed" to run the country and ensure people's safety.
"I urge all Bangladeshis to join a non-stop campaign that my party has launched to oust this unpopular, inefficient, corrupt and repressive regime," she told tens of thousands of cheering supporters in the capital.
Over 1,000 police armed with automatic weapons and metal detectors guarded the rally venue. Plain-clothed detectives kept watch from nearby rooftops, witnesses said.
Hasina, daughter of the country's slain independence leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, lost to Khaleda - widow of assassinated president General Ziaur Rahman - in a general election in 2001. The next vote is not due before October 2006.
But Hasina renewed her demand for an early election.
"Let us make October 10 not only a day of protest but a day of no-confidence in the government," she said. "Miraculously, I have returned from the doorstep of death and so I am here with you again.
"Let us give it (government) a bigger push and make the country free of misrule."
The planned strike, the latest in a series enforced by the Awami League, will fall a day after Khaleda's Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) marks three years in power.
The BNP will hold a celebration rally in Dhaka on October 9, party officials said.
British High Commissioner Anwar Choudhury was among 50 people wounded in a blast in the north-east Bangladesh town of Sylhet in May.
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