Shibir the instigator
Groups of youths dressed in jeans and shirts brought two dead bodies -- one at 6:00pm and the other at 8:00pm -- to the Shapla Chattar gathering. One man shouted at the rally that the deaths should be avenged. They also announced that the Shapla Chattar will be renamed Zubaer Chattar after one of the deceased.
People at the rally became agitated with the arrival of the dead while the carriers of the corpses urged leaders there to declare "Jihad" against the government and to fight unto death.
Similarly dressed young men were seen at every place in the city when the violence erupted. All of them wore the same tell-tale signs of the notorious Islami Chhatra Shibir men, a pro-Jamaat-e-Islami student body.
At exactly 7:15pm yesterday, a rowdy gang of young men in jeans, sneakers and tight shirts and T-shirts appeared at the Mouchak intersection. Hundreds of commuters rushed on foot to their destinations. Just then, a sports utility vehicle appeared from the direction of Bangla Motor. Mohammad Kamrul, a cigarette vendor, who witnessed the torching of the vehicle, said within seconds the driver and a front seat passenger were seen abandoning the car. And the car burst into flames. The rowdy youths melted into the crowd as a thick smoke from the burning vehicle rose into the sky.
“I saw them coming, they are not the mullahs, they looked like students,” said Kamrul.
Not very far from Mouchak on the Shanti Nagar round-about, gangs of youths lit a huge fire on the main road. The fire in turn lit up the adjacent buildings. While one group with iron rods in their hands tried to break into some shops, another group attacked the police box, setting it on fire. The gang did not stop until the police box was smashed into pieces, with flames consuming it from within. No policemen were in sight.
Volunteers from Bailey Road, one of the most famous shopping areas of the city, kept vigil in numbers and vowing to resist what they said Jamaat-Shibir men rampaging on the road.
At Kakrail round-about, other young men set fire to a number of shops. Under bright street lights they uprooted traffic signals and chunks of concrete slabs to barricade the road. While hundreds of men from the Hefajat's meeting at Shapla Chattar walked past the scene at Kakrail round-about, the Shibir men unleashed their mayhem on the business houses around them. Not far from the scene near the intersection of Kakrail mosque, about 30 armed policemen sat idly. The entire road was littered with brick chips.
At the Paltan intersection, several hundred policemen stood at the intersection, firing shots in the direction of Baitul Mukarram and Bijoynagar, where heavy barricades had been set up and set afire. The sky lit up with fires started indiscriminately by the Jamaat-Shibir men around Baitul Mukarram mosque. Several hundred armed policemen, somehow trapped at the intersection, intermittently fired volleys of rubber bullets and teargas canisters in two directions.
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