200 sued in Ctg for road blockade against eviction drive

Police on Wednesday filed six cases for attacking the police, and blocking the Dhaka-Chattogram highway for hours to disrupt eviction drives by the administration in the Jungle Salimpur area of Chattogram's Sitakunda upazila.

"Two hundred men and women, including 45 people named, were accused in these cases filed with the Sitakunda police station," Sumon Banik, inspector (investigation) of the police station, told The Business Standard.

He said in the cases, the plaintiffs brought charges against the accused, of attacking the police, vandalising vehicles, obstructing police in discharging their duties, and destroying public property. There are also cases under the explosives act, and special powers act.

Earlier on Tuesday, angry locals blocked the Dhaka-Chattogram Highway for five hours to protest the district administration's eviction drive that demolished long-standing illegal settlements in the Jungle Salimpur area of Chattogram city.

Hundreds of protesters took to the streets in front of the Bangladesh Institute of Tropical and Infectious Diseases (BITID) in the Fouzdarhat area from 1:15pm to 5:30pm, triggering a 10-kilometre gridlock on the busy highway.

Around 1 lakh homeless people lived in settlements built on 850 acres of khas or fallow government land in Jungle Salimpur and Alinagar of the upazila.  Most of them lost their ancestral homes due to climate change-induced disasters, environmentalists said at a programme on 13 August.   

In 2004 the then government sheltered these dispossessed homeless people in the area after evicting them from various slums in Chattogram city.

In the last two decades, an organisation named "Chattogram Mahanagar Chinnamul Bostibasi Sammonoy Sangram Parishad" built these settlements on government land in the area and established a "den of criminals" according to some.

The Chattogram district administration took initiatives to construct Chattogram Central Jail, a National Information Centre, Sports Village, Night Safari Park, and Novo Theatre, in the aforesaid area under the Jungle Salimpur Master Plan. To build these establishments, the administration started eviction drives at the beginning of this month.

Since then, angry residents of the area have been protesting against the eviction drives.