Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina resigned and left the country on Monday, local media reported, a day after nearly 100 people were killed in clashes with the police as protesters demanded she step down.
Video showed protesters flowing into the prime minister’s residence in Dhaka, the capital, which had been left unguarded. Reports of her resignation were met with cheers by others gathered on the streets.
Army chief Gen. Waker-Uz-Zaman was expected to address the nation, according to local media.
The South Asian country of 170 million had spent most of Monday under an internet blackout, along with a nationwide curfew that was imposed Sunday evening after the deadly clashes. But student-led protesters had called for a march toward the capital that drew people from around the country, in an effort to press Hasina, 76, the country’s longest-serving leader, to resign.
At least 95 people, including 14 police officers, were killed on Sunday in the deadliest day of protests that began in June, according to the country’s leading Bengali-language daily newspaper, Prothom Alo.
Thousands took to the streets demanding that Hasina step down, and were met with police officers who responded with tear gas and rubber bullets. Cars and buildings were set ablaze as protesters clashed with groups they said were associated with the government.
“When you’re on the streets and you look around and see thousands of people of your age, your father’s age, your sister’s age, you feel invincible,” Monorom Polok, 25, said in a telephone interview from Dhaka as he prepared to join the march on Monday.
Sunday’s death toll was the highest since the protests began over a controversial preferential quota system for public sector jobs. While they began peacefully, they evolved into fury against Hasina over the violent crackdown, in which more than 200 people have been killed and thousands of others injured over the last month, according to the Associated Press.
“The shocking violence in Bangladesh must stop,” Volker Türk, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, said in a statement Sunday.
The scheme was eventually scaled back by the country’s top court, leaving the streets relatively calm for a few days. But protesters gathered again last week, demanding justice for those killed.
As protesters called for a march, authorities responded by first cutting the internet on Sunday, in the country’s second internet blackout since the protests turned deadly.
The military, which imposed a shoot-on-sight curfew last month, also imposed another curfew in Dhaka and other divisional and district headquarters later in the day.
Netblocks, an internet monitoring group, confirmed in a post on X Monday that Bangladesh was “in the midst of a near-total national internet shutdown after earlier social media and mobile cuts.”
The Associated Press contributed.
