Dhaka, Aug 4 (AFP/APP):Thousands of Bangladeshi protesters, many wielding sticks, crowded into a central Dhaka square Sunday for mass protests demanding Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina resign following a deadly police crackdown.
Asif Mahmud, one of the key protest leaders in a nationwide civil disobedience campaign, asked supporters to be ready to fight.
"Prepare bamboo sticks and liberate Bangladesh," he wrote on Facebook on Sunday.
While the army stepped in to help restore order in the wake of earlier protests, some former military officers have since joined the student movement, and ex-army chief General Ikbal Karim Bhuiyan turned his Facebook profile picture red in a show of support.
Current army chief Waker-uz-Zaman spoke to officers at military headquarters in Dhaka on Saturday, telling them the "Bangladesh Army is the symbol of trust of the people".
"It always stood by the people and will do so for the sake of people and in any need of the state," he said, according to an army statement issued late Saturday.
The statement did not give further details, and did not explicitly say whether the army backed the protests.
Rallies against civil service job quotas sparked days of mayhem in July that killed more than 200 people in some of the worst unrest of Hasina's 15-year tenure.
Troops briefly restored order but crowds returned to the streets in huge numbers this week in an all-out non-cooperation movement aimed at paralysing the government.
On Saturday, when hundreds of thousands of protesters marched in Dhaka, the police were largely bystanders watching the rallies.
