Four dead on final day of Bangladesh strike

Four people were killed in strikes across Bangladesh Tuesday, bringing to 20 the death toll in demonstrations aimed at forcing the premier to make way for a caretaker government ahead of elections. An official said officers opened fire on remote Kutubdia island in the Bay of Bengal after hundreds of protesters from Jamaat-i-Islami, the country's largest Islamist party and a key ally of the main opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), attacked police with rocks and sticks.
"Two protesters have died in the firing," district administrator Ruhul Amin told AFP, adding that about a dozen policemen were injured in the clashes. Two more demonstrators were in critical condition after being shot, Kutubdia health centre doctor Abul Bashar told AFP, and were referred to a hospital on the mainland. Another two people were killed in an earlier series of clashes between the opposition and ruling party supporters Tuesday.
The four fatalities brought to 20 the death toll since Friday, when the opposition began a push to force Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina to quit. After a series of mass rallies at the weekend, the BNP and its Islamist allies launched a three-day general strike, which ended Tuesday. BNP leader Khaleda Zia, who has twice served as premier, has branded the current government "illegal" and says that a neutral caretaker government must be set up three months before national elections, due in January.
Hasina has scrapped the caretaker system and instead proposed an all-party interim government led by herself to oversee the polls. On Saturday, Hasina invited Zia to hold talks and urged her to postpone the strike, during a 40-minute phone conversation believed to be the first time the "battling begums" have spoken in at least a decade. "Begum" is an honorific for a Muslim woman of rank. Zia spurned the request, but said she was ready for talks after Tuesday.
Leaked audiotape of the conversation has since showed the two leaders spent most of the conversation quarrelling over their past records. "You killed people by carrying out the August 21 grenade attack," Hasina said during the call, referring to blasts at her rally in 2004 which injured her - then the opposition leader, and killed at least 20 people.