Hundreds protest in Bangladesh over religious violence

DHAKA (Reuters) – Hundreds of people protested in Bangladesh’s capital Dhaka on Monday calling for an end to religious violence that has gripped the country for four days, leading to at least two deaths and several injured.

The violence began on Oct. 15, when hundreds of Muslims protested in the southeastern Noakhali district over an allegedly blasphemous incident. Two Hindu men died following that protest, Mohammed Shahidul Islam, the police chief in Noakhali, told Reuters by phone.

“There is some confusion about whether they died due to the unlawful assembly, or otherwise,” Islam said, adding that police are investigating the deaths. “They (the protestors) were miscreants, actually, that is all we can say.”

Islam declined to share further details.

Several Hindu religious sites have been attacked in recent days, which the country’s home minister Asaduzzaman Khan said were attacks aimed at destroying the communal harmony in Bangladesh. Hindus make up around 10% of the Muslim-majority country’s population.

“No incident has been reported since Saturday night. Our security forces are working patiently based on intelligence information,” Khan told the news agency ANI.

Unidentified “miscreants” attacked some homes in the Rangpur city on Monday, police told the agency.

The unrest is some of the worst in Bangladesh since Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s Awami League party came to power there in 2009. It poses a challenge to her party, which is seen as the more secular one of the two political groups that have alternated power in Bangladesh for most of its independent history.

Some of those gathered to protest near the Dhaka University in the capital city on Monday held up banners that demanded the police identify the attackers and bring them to justice.

“Safety of minorities in the country must be ensured,” one of the banners read.

(Reporting by Zeba Siddiqui and Rafiqur Rahman; Editing by Alistair Bell)

Two die in Ireland, Northern Ireland as Storm Ali strikes

People look out at rough sea from Slea Head during Storm Ali in Coumeenoole, Ireland, September 19, 2018. REUTERS/Clodagh Kilcoyne

DUBLIN/BELFAST (Reuters) – A woman died on Wednesday when high winds blew her caravan off a cliff in the Irish Republic and a man died in Northern Ireland as Storm Ali grounded flights and left over 200,000 people across the island without electricity.

Irish police said the body of the woman, who was in her 50s, was recovered on a beach in the village of Claddaghduff in the western county of Galway after her caravan fell from the cliff above.

Police in the British province of Northern Ireland said later on Wednesday an engineer working for the Northern Ireland Water utility was killed in an incident involving a tree.

Some 126,000 homes and businesses were without electricity in the Irish Republic due to gale force winds that reached over 140 kilometers per hour, down from an earlier peak of 186,000, while power cuts hit another 90,000 homes north of the border.

More than 50 flights in and out of Dublin airport were canceled.

Ireland’s National Meteorological Service said severe gusts would persist in some areas but that, particularly in the west of the country, winds would continue to abate through the late afternoon and evening.

Three people died in Ireland last October when Tropical Storm Ophelia whipped up 10-metre high waves and battered every corner of the country.

(Reporting by Padraic Halpin in Dublin and Ian Graham in Belfast; Editing by Mark Heinrich)