Thousands of irate readymade garments (RMG) workers went berserk and clashed with law enforcement personnel in the capital, Savar, and in the port city of Chittagong, on Saturday.
Five people sustained bullet injuries and some 20 others were wounded, when police fired shots on agitating garment workers, near Rana Plaza at Savar, in the morning.
The police said the trouble started at Bank Town near Rana Plaza around 9.30am, when a group of RMG workers, angered by the slow rescue operations in the building that had collapsed, tried to break through the police cordon. Later, the law enforcement personnel fired some 50 rounds of rubber bullets and lobbed 20 teargas canisters to disperse them, injuring the five.
Four of those injured—Shahid, Murad, Yakub Ali and Johnny—were admitted to Enam Medical College and Hospital, in critical condition. Another was rushed to Dhaka Medical College Hospital. The fifth injured person has not been identified yet.
Security on the Rana Plaza compound has been beefed up following the incident, police said.
Unruly workers also blocked Mirpur Road for two hours in the morning, but were dispersed later.
In Chittagong, garment workers staged a demonstration protesting against the collapse of Rana Plaza in Savar, and demanding the death penalty for the owner of the building.
During the demonstration, the garment workers set ablaze three covered vans and blockaded the city’s Airport Road for hours. They also brought out processions from different industrial areas of the city, in protest against the tragic incident and demanded safe working places.
Several hundred workers brought out a procession from the city’s Oxygen area, at about 9 am, to protest against the tragedy. At one stage, some angry workers set fire to three covered vans belonging to Abul Khair group near Chittagong Cantonment Public School and College. Fire brigade men rushed to the spot and succeeded in dousing the fire, before the vehicles were completely burnt.
Additional law enforcement agency members rushed to the area and brought the situation under control.
Besides, hundreds of workers took to the streets in the city’s Chittagong and Karnaphuli EPZ areas in the morning, and started converging on the Chittagong EPZ intersection. At one stage, the garments workers put up barricades, thereby disrupting vehicular movement on the city’s Airport Road.
High-ranking police officials rushed to the EPZ intersection and persuaded the irate workers to withdraw the road barricades at 11 am.
The garments workers also brought out protest processions from the city’s Kalurghat BSCIC industrial area, Agrabad, Terry Bazaar, Jamal Khan, Sadorghat and Olonkar areas.
On the other hand, Industrial Police (IP) have taken extensive preventive measures to check any sort of unrest in the readymade garments (RMG) sector in Chittagong, as a fallout of the Rana Plaza tragedy.
-With The Independent input
