Protesters in Bangladesh have vandalised and set fire to the former family home of deposed prime minister Sheikh Hasina, as well as those of other members of her party.

The unrest was sparked by news that Hasina would address the country via social media from India, where she has been in exile since a student-led revolt ousted her last year.

The 77-year-old Hasina, who was in charge of Bangladesh for 20 years, was seen as an autocrat whose government ruthlessly clamped down on dissent.

On Wednesday evening, an excavator smashed down the house of Hasina’s late father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, who is also Bangladesh’s founding president. The structure had been repurposed into a museum.

Hasina’s father is widely viewed as an independence hero, but anger at his daughter has tarnished his legacy among Hasina’s critics.

In a Facebook livestream, Hasina condemned the attack on her father’s former home and demanded “justice”.

“They can demolish a building, but they can’t erase history,” she said.

While Hasina fled to India last August, anger has not dissipated against her and members of her party Awami League. More than 200 people were killed last year when Hasina’s government attempted to crack down on the protests.

On Wednesday, protesters also vandalised and torched the houses and businesses of senior Awami League leaders. There have been calls on social media to rid the country of “pilgrimage sites of fascism”.

Police told the BBC’s Bengali service that around 700 protesters showed up at the residence on Wednesday night, and dozens of police officers were deployed.

Since Hasina’s ouster, a caretaker government led by Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus has kept the country running.

Yunus has pledged to hold elections in late 2025 or early 2026.

(BBC)

USAID personnel posted overseas will be recalled from their postings within 30 days, the agency said in a statement on its website.

The aid agency said it would consider case-by-case exceptions and extensions based on “personal or family hardship, mobility or safety concerns, or other reasons”.

“For example, the Agency will consider exceptions based on the timing of dependents’ school term, personal or familial medical needs, pregnancy, and other reasons. Further guidance on how to request an exception will be forthcoming,” the statement said.

USAID’s announcement comes as the Trump administration is considering abolishing the agency and subsuming its functions into the US Department of State.

Asked by a reporter on Tuesday if he was preparing to “wind down” the agency, Trump said, “I think so.”

On Monday, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio confirmed that he was serving as acting administrator of USAID.

USAID, which disbursed more than half of Washington’s $72bn foreign aid budget in 2023, has become a prime target of the cost-cutting drive spearheaded by tech billionaire Elon Musk and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency.

Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, has called USAID a “criminal organisation“, without substantiation, and claimed the agency is a “viper’s nest of radical-left Marxists who hate America”.

Critics have accused Trump and Musk of acting beyond their authority, arguing that dismantling USAID through executive action is unconstitutional as the agency’s status was established by an act of Congress.

(aljazeera.com)

Eleven people were killed in a shooting at an adult education centre on Tuesday, Swedish police said, marking the country’s deadliest gun attack in what the prime minister called a “painful day.”

Police said the gunman was believed to be among those killed and a search for other possible victims was continuing at the school, located in the city of Orebro. The gunman’s motive was not immediately known.

“We know that 10 or so people have been killed here today. The reason that we can’t be more exact currently is that the extent of the incident is so large,” local police chief Roberto Eid Forest told a news conference.

Later in the evening the police website said: “At this time, there are 11 deaths due to the incident. The number of injured is still unclear. We currently have no information on the condition of those who have been injured.”

Forest told the press conference police believed the gunman had acted alone and that terrorism was not currently suspected as a motive, though he cautioned that much remained unknown. He said the suspected gunman had not previously been known to police.

“We have a big crime scene, we have to complete the searches we are conducting in the school. There are a number of investigative steps we are taking: a profile of the perpetrator, witness interviews,” Forest said.

The shooting took place in Orebro, some 200 km (125 miles) west of Stockholm, at the Risbergska school for adults who did not complete their formal education or failed to get the grades to continue to higher education. It is located on a campus that also houses schools for children.

Ali Elmokad was outside the Orebro University Hospital, looking for his relative, not yet knowing if he was among the injured or the dead.

“We’ve been trying to get hold of him all day, we haven’t been successful,” he said, adding that he had a friend who also attended the school. “What she saw was so terrible. She only saw people lying on the floor, injured and blood everywhere.”

Police said it was still going through the crime scene and had searched several addresses in Orebro after the attack.

Late on Tuesday, police vans and personnel were still outside an apartment building in central Orebro that had been raided earlier.

“We saw a lot of police with drawn weapons,” said Lingam Tuohmaki, 42, who lives in the same building. “We were at home and heard a commotion outside.”

Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson said it was the worst mass shooting in Swedish history.

“It is hard to take in the full extent of what has happened today — the darkness that now lowers itself across Sweden tonight,” he told a news conference.

King Carl XVI Gustav conveyed his condolences. “It is with deep sadness and dismay that my family and I received the news about the terrible atrocity in Orebro,” he said.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen expressed her sympathy on X, saying: “In this dark hour, we stand with the people of Sweden.”

‘WE STARTED RUNNING’

Maria Pegado, 54, a teacher at the school, said someone threw open the door to her classroom just after lunch break and shouted to everyone to get out.

“I took all my 15 students out into the hallway and we started running,” she told Reuters by phone. “Then I heard two shots but we made it out. We were close to the school entrance.

“I saw people dragging injured out, first one, then another. I realised it was very serious,” she said.

Many students in Sweden’s adult school system are immigrants seeking to improve basic education and gain degrees to help them find jobs in the Nordic country while also learning Swedish.

Sweden has been struggling with a wave of shootings and bombings caused by an endemic gang crime problem that has seen the country of 10 million people record by far the highest per capita rate of gun violence in the EU in recent years.

However, fatal attacks at schools are rare.

Ten people were killed in seven incidents of deadly violence at schools between 2010 and 2022, according to the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention.

Sweden has a high level of gun ownership by European standards, mainly linked to hunting, though it is much lower than in the United States, while the gang crime wave has highlighted the high incidence of illegal weapons.

In one of the highest-profile crimes of the past decade, a 21-year-old masked assailant driven by racist motives killed a teaching assistant and a boy and wounded two others in 2015.

In 2017, a man driving a truck mowed down shoppers on a busy street in central Stockholm before crashing into a department store. Five people died in that attack.

Source: Reuters