AL’s strategies failed: Fakhrul

BNP Acting Secretary General Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir has said that the ruling Awami League's ‘strategies’ to manipulate the first and second phase results of the Upazila Parishads have failed.

He said in a discussion in Dhaka on Sunday that the government tried various ways to swing the results in their favour but failed because "the people are against them”.

The Jatiyatabadi Swechchhasebak Dal, volunteer wing of the BNP, organised the discussion at the National Press Club auditorium, demanding the release of detained Swechchhasebak Dal General Secretary Mir Sharfat Ali Sapu and its Organising Secretary Shafiul Bari Babu.

It also pressed for the holding of the national election again under a non-party caretaker government.

In the first and second phases of local body elections held in 210 Upazila Parishads on February 19 and 27 respectively, the BNP-backed candidates secured 96 chairman posts and those backed by the Jamaat-e-Islami, the key ally of the BNP-led 19-Party Alliance, won 19.

So, the total number of chairman posts jointly secured by the BNP and Jamaat is 116.

The Awami League-supported chairman candidates won in 79 Upazilas.

Fakhrul claimed that the BNP leaders and activists are being killed and abducted randomly.

“The government isn’t satisfied with filing false cases against the leaders and activists of opposition parties.”

“Our leaders and activists are being killed after their reported disappearance in questionable circumstance. Earlier, people used to be killed in crossfire, but now they’re being killed in gunfight.”

The BNP leader said the killings in ‘gunfight’ were setting a ‘bad precedence’. “One of the three militants, who were snatched from a police prison van near Trishal in Mymensingh, was killed in a gunfight soon after he was captured. Detailed information about the snatching could have been obtained from him. But he was killed at night under mysterious circumstances.”

He further said, “Even today another person has been killed in a so-called crossfire in Magura. The people have no security of life. Anyone may be detained (by law enforcers) and killed in the name of a gunfight.”

He said that a total of 304 people were killed across the country in police firing between October 25 last year and January 25 this year.

Presided over by Swechchhasebak Dal President Habib-un-Nabi Khan Sohel, the programme was addressed, among others, by BNP Chairperson Khaleda Zia’s Advisor Shamsuzzaman Dudu.