Bangladesh faces more protests

Bangladesh faces more protests

DHAKA (Reuter): Fundamentalists vowed more protests yesterday
over an alleged insult to Islam by writer Taslima Nasrin after
fighting across Bangladesh on Thursday left one man dead and
nearly 200 people injured.

The Bangladesh government called for calm and said only its
intervention had prevented worse violence in the clashes which
erupted during a general strike called by both fundamentalists
and their rivals.

"The government expects that all people would show restraint
and shun the path of violence in the greater interest of
democracy and discipline," Home Minister Abdul Matin Chowdhury
told parliament late on Thursday.

One man was shot dead when Islamic militants tried to snatch
rifles from police at Kishoreganj, northeast of the capital,
Dhaka.

The strike, which shut down Dhaka and the ports of Chittagong
and Mongla, was called by both the ultra-rightist Islamic Morcha,
who are demanding Nasrin's execution, and their rivals, who have
vowed to stop a resurgence of Islamic fundamentalism.

Nasrin, a physician-turned-writer, provoked Moslem fury in
Bangladesh for remarks attributed to her in India's Statesman
newspaper. She said Islam's holy book, the Koran, should be
"revised thoroughly".

About 8,000 fundamentalists on Thursday set fire to a foreign-
funded development center and a rural hospital in northeast
Bangladesh, local officials said.

The militants, armed with sticks and rocks, said they resented
the foreign-aided non-governmental organizations (NGOs) as much
as they hated Nasrin.