437 Ansars sued over clashes near Secretariat

A total of 437 Ansar personnel have been named as suspects in four cases that also accuse 11,100 unidentified people over clashes between the members of the force and students outside the Secretariat in Dhaka on Sunday night.
The cases were filed at Shahbagh, Ramna, Airport, and Paltan police stations on charges related to attempted murder, grievous injury, illegal gathering, rioting, and assaulting law enforcers.
As many as 377 Ansar members, including two women, were produced before the Chief Metropolitan Magistrate’s Court of Dhaka in these cases yesterday. The court sent all of them to jail after hearing the police forwarding reports submitted by the investigators.
A total of 191 Ansar members were arrested in the case filed at Shahbagh Police Station, 85 at Ramna, 95 at Paltan and six were arrested in the case filed at Airport Police Station.
According to the case statements, the Ansar personnel carrying sticks and brick chunks were instigated by some unidentified people in a planned attack on police and students with the intent to kill.
The suspects are also accused of obstructing police duty, vandalising vehicles, and throwing brick chunks at the Secretariat. The law enforcers requested the court to keep the arrestees in jail until the end of the investigation so that the actual reasons behind continuing the protests could be unearthed.
Despite the assurance of fulfilling their demands, Ansar members continued to block the Secretariat gates before the clashes that left at least 50 people injured.
Maj Gen Abdul Motaleb Sazzad Mahmud, director general of the Ansar and Village Defence Party, told The Daily Star, “We were trying to find a possible solution, and a committee was formed for this, but those people [protesters] were not interested in it.”
They did not even know what “nationalisation” meant, according to him. “They were just protesting for what they were taught. Their target was to destabilise the nation.”
He said the authorities had information that those from outside Dhaka were instructed to bring extra uniforms for those without these dresses. “I know my force members, but those faces were unknown,” said the Ansar DG.
He alleged irrational recruitment over the last 10 years allowed Ansar to swell to a 90,000-strong force despite having around 50,000 posts. “This was done in a very organised manner,” he said.
Law Adviser Prof Asif Nazrul also said those who came “in the guise of Ansar members had a different agenda behind their demands and a plan to create a terrible situation”.
“Creating chaos was their main objective. They had a stock of sticks, and we saw how they attacked the students,” he told reporters while visiting the injured at Dhaka Medical College Hospital. “They besieged the Secretariat to cause disruption for an unrealistic and impossible demand.”
Asif Nazrul further mentioned that the students are vigilant, and the government will take legal action against anyone attempting to sabotage the interim government’s work in the name of protests.
Power, Energy, and Mineral Resources Adviser Muhammad Fouzul Kabir Khan and Education and Planning Adviser Wahiduddin Mahmud also visited the injured students.
DMCH Director Maj Gen Asaduzzaman said the condition of Hasnat Abdullah, a coordinator of the student movement who was injured in the clashes, was now stable and under 48-hour observation for head injuries, he said.
The clashes also left six army officials injured, one of them critically, the Inter-Services Public Relation Directorate (ISPR) said in a press release yesterday. It said the demonstrators refused to leave the area and confined seven advisers of the interim government, the Ansar DG, and other senior officials to the Secretariat even after the authorities accepted their demands.
The army soldiers fired 27 rounds of warning shots after their bid to make the protesters desist failed. Later, additional troops were deployed in the area and they brought the situation under control, the release added.