{"id":27399,"date":"2018-12-30T07:22:12","date_gmt":"2018-12-30T07:22:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=27399"},"modified":"2018-12-30T07:22:12","modified_gmt":"2018-12-30T07:22:12","slug":"bangladesh-shuts-down-mobile-internet-in-lead-up-to-election-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=27399","title":{"rendered":"Bangladesh shuts down mobile internet in lead up to election day"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Bangladesh<\/span>‘s telecoms regulator has ordered\u00a0mobile\u00a0<\/span>operators to shut down high-speed\u00a0mobile\u00a0<\/span>internet services until midnight Sunday, the day of a national election<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The measure is effective immediately, a spokesman for the\u00a0Bangladesh\u00a0<\/a><\/span>Telecommunication Regulatory Commission said on Saturday.<\/p>\n

“The decision has been taken to prevent rumours and propaganda surrounding the vote,” Zakir Hussain Khan said.<\/p>\n

As Bangladeshis get set for Sunday’s parliamentary elections<\/a>, there are fears that violence and intimidation could keep many voters away.<\/p>\n

The decade-long tenure of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina<\/a>, whose ruling party hopes to retain power in the elections, has been marred by allegations of mass arrests and jailing of activists and critics, forced disappearances and extrajudicial killings.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP)<\/span> led the campaign for the deployment of over 600,000 soldiers, border patrol, paramilitary and police officers who have fanned out across the country in advance of the elections.<\/p>\n

A spokesman for the RAB, Bangladesh’s elite security force, said on Saturday they had arrested eight men for spreading rumours on social media<\/a> before the poll.<\/p>\n

The polls, the 11th since Bangladesh won independence from Pakistan<\/a> in 1971, pit 71-year-old Hasina against a united opposition helmed by Kamal Hossain, 82, an Oxford-educated lawyer and former foreign minister.<\/p>\n

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Notably absent is former Prime Minister Khaleda Zia, 74, Hasina’s archrival and the head of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party.<\/p>\n

Courts ruled she was ineligible to run from her colonial-era Dhaka jail cell, where she’s serving a 17-year sentence for corruption<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Hasina, daughter of Bangladesh’s founding father Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and now its longest-serving leader, is seeking a third-straight term since winning a landslide in December 2008<\/p>\n

She has been praised for presiding over healthy GDP expansion, with the country set to graduate from a least developed country to a middle-income nation, and lauded for opening Bangladesh’s doors to around one million Rohingya<\/a> refugees fleeing a military crackdown in Myanmar<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But critics accuse her of muzzling free speech and clamping down on dissent, including through a draconian anti-press law toughened this year.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Bangladesh’s telecoms regulator has ordered\u00a0mobile\u00a0operators to shut down high-speed\u00a0mobile\u00a0internet services until midnight Sunday, the day of a national election. The measure is effective immediately, a spokesman for the\u00a0Bangladesh\u00a0Telecommunication Regulatory Commission said on Saturday. “The decision has been taken to prevent rumours and propaganda surrounding the vote,” Zakir Hussain Khan said. As Bangladeshis get set for…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":27400,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-27399","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-middle_east_news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27399","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=27399"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27399\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/27400"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=27399"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=27399"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=27399"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}