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A UAE court has sentenced 57 Bangladeshi nationals to prison for staging demonstrations in the Gulf country in solidarity with student protesters back home.
Bangladesh has been experiencing its worst unrest in almost a decade as mass protests over quotas for government jobs turned violent, resulting in the deaths of over 170 people, mostly students.
The Supreme Court scaled back the government jobs quotas on Sunday but not before thousands of people suffered injuries as protesting students clashed with the security forces who fired tear gas and rubber bullets at them.
The Sheikh Hasina government eventually issued a “shoot-on-sight” order, declared an indefinite curfew and a partial communication blackout, and deployed the army in the capital Dhaka to contain the protests.
Bangladeshis living abroad held demonstrations in solidarity with the agitation back home, including in the UAE.
Those who marched in the streets of the Gulf nation “in protest against decisions made by the Bangladesh government" were arrested last Friday.
Three of them were sentenced to life in prison, 53 to 10 years each, and one to 11 years for "gathering and inciting riots", according to the state news agency.
They will be deported to Bangladesh after completing their sentences, the news agency reported.
Unauthorised protests are prohibited in the UAE as are any actions that offend foreign states or jeopardise relations with them.
In Bangladesh, at least 1,200 people, including students and opposition members, have been arrested in a crackdown on the protesters, according to the AFP.
Ms Hasina on Monday blamed her political rivals for inciting the violence and said the curfew, imposed on Friday, will be lifted "whenever the situation gets better".
"When arson terrorism started, the protesting students said they weren’t involved in it," the prime minister said, holding the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, the Jamaat-e-Islami and its student wing responsible for the violence.
"We were forced to impose a curfew to protect the lives and property of the citizens. I never wanted it.”
The student group leading the protests suspended the protest for 48 hours and asked the government to meet its demands within that time. It demanded a public apology from Ms Hasina and the reopening of the university campuses that were shut when the violence began.
The government on Monday said it would comply with a Supreme Court ruling ordering that 93 per cent of government jobs be allocated on merit, five per cent be reserved for veterans of the country’s 1971 war of independence, and two per cent for members of ethnic minorities and transgender and disabled people. An earlier court ruling said 30 per cent of the jobs should go to war veterans and their descendants.
Several countries, including India, one of Bangladesh’s main allies, issued travel advisories for its residents as Dhaka resembled a war zone over the weekend.
The UK advised its citizens "against all but essential travel to the whole of Bangladesh", while Germany cautioned against travelling to the South Asian country as “further restrictions and deterioration of the situation are to be expected”.
New Delhi said over 4,500 Indian students have returned home from Bangladesh over the past few days.
