Bangladesh to airlift wounded uprising leader after election shooting

DHAKA: Bangladesh’s interim government said it would fly a leader of the 2024 uprising, a candidate in upcoming elections, for treatment in Singapore after an assassination attempt that left him critically wounded.

Masked attackers shot student leader Sharif Osman Hadi on Friday as he left a mosque in the capital Dhaka, wounding him in the ear.

The shooting took place one day after authorities announced a date for the first elections since the student-led uprising last year that overthrew the autocratic government of Sheikh Hasina.

In a statement late Sunday, the interim government said that “Sharif Osman Hadi will be flown to Singapore for better treatment. Travel arrangements, including an air ambulance and a team of doctors, are on standby.”

It added that “the state will bear all expenses.”

Hadi is a senior leader of the student protest group Inqilab Mancha and has been an outspoken critic of India — Hasina’s old ally where the ousted prime minister remains in self-imposed exile.

Police said they had launched a manhunt for the attackers who shot Hadi, releasing photographs of two key suspects and offering a reward of five million taka (about $42,000) for information leading to their arrest.

Dhaka police spokesman Muhammad Talebur Rahman also said that “border security has been put on high alert.”

Interim leader Muhammad Yunus, the 85-year-old Nobel Peace Prize winner leading Bangladesh until the February 12 elections, said on Saturday that the shooting was a premeditated attack carried out by a powerful network, without providing a name.

“The objective of the conspirators is to derail the election. This attack is symbolic — meant to demonstrate their strength and sabotage the entire electoral process,” he said.

“We must resist such attempts”.

The government on Sunday said it would bolster security for all candidates, ordering that “all political leaders, candidates, their residences, offices, movements, rallies and online spaces will be protected.”

The Muslim-majority country of 170 million will choose 300 lawmakers for its parliament, as well as vote in a referendum on a landmark democratic reform package on the same day.

Tensions are high as parties gear up for the polls, and the country remains volatile.

Hasina, convicted in absentia last month and sentenced to death, refused to return to attend her trial. She remains in hiding in India, despite Dhaka’s repeated requests for New Delhi to hand her over.

The last elections, held in January 2024, gave Hasina a fourth straight term and her now-banned Awami League party 222 seats, but were decried by opposition parties as a sham.

The Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), led by three-time former prime minister Khaleda Zia, is widely tipped to win.

Zia is in intensive care in Dhaka, and her son and political heir Tarique Rahman is set to return from exile in Britain after 17 years on December 25.