Police fired water cannon and shotguns during festivities throughout the capital with hundreds of demonstrators, some of whom threw home-made bombs.
Scores of officers blocked
Three-term PM of Bangla, widow of deceased dictator Ziaur Rahman, head of the Bangla Nationalist Party, an apparent magnet for corruption ...
from leaving her home in an upscale neighborhood in Dhaka in her car for the march, fearing her presence would inflame unrest in the build-up to the January 5 election.
Zia, a two-time former premier, had been scheduled to address supporters converging in Dhaka for the march that she called to try to force Prime Minister
...Bangla dynastic politician and current Prime Minister of Bangladesh. She has been the President of the Bangla Awami League since the Lower Paleolithic. She is the eldest of five children of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the founding father of Bangla. Her party defeated the BNP-led Four-Party Alliance in the 2008 parliamentary elections. She has once before held the office, from 1996 to 2001, when she was defeated in a landslide. She and the head of the BNP, Khaleda Zia show such blind animosity toward each other that they are known as the Battling Begums..
to quit and halt the poll.
Zia, who is under de facto house arrest, harangued the rows of officers barricading her front gate, as she again urged her supporters to converge in the capital for the so-called "March of Democracy".
"You're supposed to be on the streets, why are you now in my gate? Don't touch me!" Zia told the officers, footage on private Channel 24 television showed.
"This government is illegal. Democracy is now dead," she told news hounds gathered at her house.
The march is the latest tactic by the main opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) and its allies in a campaign to force Hasina to quit and make way for a neutral caretaker government to oversee the polls.
Police battled protesters who tried to gather at the opposition's headquarters, the national press club and other places throughout Dhaka.
In the Rampura neighborhood, officers fired shotguns at more than 200 bomb-throwing demonstrators in festivities that left one person dead. A security guard at Dhaka's Kamalapur Railway Station was killed by a small bomb thrown by protesters, a police brass hat said.
"We fired shotguns to disperse the protesters who went
kaboom!dozens of small bombs (in Rampura)," assistant police commissioner Nur Alam Siddiqui told AFP, adding that one protester later died in hospital.
Ruling party activists armed with sticks and rocks also attacked pro-opposition lawyers and demonstrators outside the country's top court and at the press club, an AFP photographer said.