After a brief lull in the violence amid the ongoing intermittent hartal and indefinite blockade, it has come back to square one.
Towards the end of the last month, there was a considerable decline in violence during the shutdowns and blockade.
The violence, however, suddenly flared up last Sunday with around 43 vehicles damaged or set on fire.
Even the capital, that had barely witnessed any major incidents of firebombing, too saw four persons burnt, including a reporter of the private television Channel 71 on Sunday.
The reporter is now undergoing treatment at the Burn and Plastic Surgery Unit of Dhaka Medical College Hospital.
Just a day after that at least seven people received splinter injuries in a crude bomb attack by pro-hartal pickets.
Five people were injured in a similar attack on a staff bus of Janata Bank in the capital’s Jatrabari area.
The most worrying thing is attackers take to the street out of the blue and resort to violence before they disappear into an alleyway.
In the blink of an eye, they vandalise vehicles and hurl petrol bombs to put the vehicles on fire and flee the scene immediately.
Miscreants did this in similar fashion in front of the Desh TV office at Mouchak on Saturday night, under the Gulishtan flyover on Sunday, and at Hatirjheel on Monday.
All the attacks were carried out in just three to five minutes during which time some youths first exploded crude bombs to scare people away and then began vandalising vehicles before they set them on fire.
Monirul Islam, joint commissioner of Detective Branch (DB) of police, yesterday blamed the media for such attacks.
“As you are reporting that there has been no violence in the capital, a political group has imported hoodlums into the city to unleash violence.”
“We have marked video footage of people involved in the attack on the Desh TV office and in Hatirjheel area,” says Monirul, also the chief of DB police.
Of them, a number of people have already been arrested while the rest will soon be caught, he added.
