10 minority Urdu speaking killed in Bangladesh clashes

10 minority Urdu speaking killed in Bangladesh

clashes

 

 

News Desk,20 June,2014: At least 15 people from Bangladesh's urdu speaking minority have been killed in a massacre at a "Bihari camp" between camp residents, local MP backed Bengalis and police in capital city Dhaka on Saturday morning. The clash was caused by a dispute over the use of firecrackers for religious celebrations on the night of Shab-e-Barat -- the mid-point of the Islamic month preceding holy month Ramadan -- which led to Bengali attackers setting fire to houses in the camp. Mahbubul Haq,a police official from the local police station said, on condition of anonymity, that police were trying to contain the situation. Although it is legally prohibited to use fire crackers on festive nights, both Bengalis and Biharis regularly use fire crackers in their areas as part of centuries-old traditions. Camp residents initially refused to hand over the bodies of the dead but have now released nine bodies to authorities for postmortems which will identify whether they died by gunfire -- another person died in hospital on Saturday morning. Dhaka's deputy commissioner Tofazzal Hossain Mia and local MP Shahida Tarekh Dipti met with Bihari leader Abdul Jabbar Khan at the camp and promised legal action against the attackers. Biharis, often referred to as "Stranded Pakistanis", are Urdu-speaking Muslims who moved from Indian states to current-day Bangladesh when it became East Pakistan, after the partition of united India in 1947. They have faced much hostility and mostly lived in refugee camps since Bangladesh's birth in 1971. There are some 20,00,000 Urdu-speaking residents in Bangladesh.