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.