19 July 2024: The longest Friday in Bangladesh’s recent political history

"First, I'll collect the clothes from the balcony. Then I'll make pizza."

Those were the last words 16-year-old Naima Akter Sultana said to her mother on the afternoon of 19 July 2024.

It was a Friday. Naima had spent much of the day painting after the noon prayers. Earlier, she had asked her mother whether there was any chicken left in the refrigerator. There was. She decided she would make pizza for the family once she finished bringing in the clothes drying outside.

She never returned from the balcony.

Outside their fourth-floor apartment in Uttara, protesters had poured onto the streets after Friday prayers. Police were attempting to disperse them with relentless gunfire. The sound of bullets echoed continuously through the neighbourhood.

Naima had wanted to join the anti-quota movement from the very beginning. Her mother would not allow it. Instead, the Milestone School student supported the movement from home. She shared videos on Facebook, WhatsApp and Messenger. She circulated the locations where protesters could find drinking water, bandages and medicine. She even painted a picture inspired by the movement—an artwork that travelled widely across social media, both inside and outside Bangladesh. 

She was shot by the police. Her mother saw her brain blown away.

Naima was declared dead that evening. She was 16.

Across Bangladesh, 19 July 2024, was the day the state's efforts to squash the quota reform movement stopped being crowd control and became a massacre. 

Shoot at sight 

The day began in enforced silence. The nationwide internet shutdown imposed the previous evening was still holding; connectivity had collapsed to near zero after the government ordered mobile networks cut, leaving families unable to reach the wounded and the outside world unable to see what was coming. The digital commerce and technology sectors alone would report losses exceeding Tk80 crore in 24 hours, according to the software industry body Basis. The Dhaka Metropolitan Police banned all rallies and processions under Section 144. Rail links between the capital and the rest of the country were severed. 

The political machinery matched the blackout in ruthlessness. The ruling Awami League's general secretary, Obaidul Quader, told reporters the curfew order would mean 'shoot at sight'. At midnight, the government formalised a curfew nationwide under the Special Powers Act of 1974 and deployed the army. A round of talks at the Padma state guest house, where the law minister Anisul Huq and two colleagues met three movement coordinators, produced nothing; by then, the coordinators were saying that after so much killing, there was no path left to negotiate. 

Dhaka turned a battlefield

Rampura and Badda saw some of the worst of it. Many of the protesters were teenagers, dragging felled trees and electric poles into barricades, the roads carpeted with broken brick. Near the TV Centre around noon, Border Guard Bangladesh opened fire and killed at least one student where he stood; others died of their wounds later. 

In Mohammadpur, Bheribadh, and Dhanmondi, running battles went on for hours between protesters and security forces backed by ruling party activists. In Purana Paltan, demonstrators fought the BGB in the street; in Shantinagar, they threw up barricades and set the road alight.

By afternoon, Mirpur had become a war zone. Crowds torched the Dhaka North City Corporation office and the BRTA building; the Mirpur 10 and Kazipara stations were gutted. Overhead, Rapid Action Battalion helicopters circled and fired sound grenades into the neighbourhoods below. Residents described pigeons falling dead from the sky. Witnesses, and later researchers, reported that live rounds and snipers were also part of the aerial assault. 

Overhead, Rapid Action Battalion helicopters circled and fired sound grenades into the neighbourhoods below. Photo: Rajib Dhar

There, I spent part of that afternoon on those streets. The internet had been dead since the day before, so there was no filing and no calling out — only the noise. I crouched behind a shuttered shop as one wave of protesters surged forward and another broke back, slogans splitting the air, brick chunks falling like rain. A boy of 16 or 17 took a bullet and dropped; the boy behind him vaulted the body and ran on towards the police line, and then he fell too. Then a tall, fair young man leant out from the mouth of the alley, and at the crack he folded, without a sound, back onto the people behind him with a bullet through the left side of his chest, at the lung, his shirt drowning in red. Dead where he stood.

I stood there, eyes wide, and forgot even to raise my phone. 

Sound grenades burst one after another until my ears simply locked. I saw columns of black smoke rising from the direction of BRTA. And I saw the RAB helicopter overhead; it had gone towards Mirpur 14, where it would reportedly kill Safkat Samir. A column of black smoke was climbing over the skyline. 

The indiscriminate, wholesale massacre 

The wounded arrived faster than doctors could count them. At the Faraji Hospital in the Rampura-Banasree area, 10 people were declared dead on arrival, all of them shot, and more than 300 injured were treated through the day, the great majority carrying bullet wounds. At the Kuwait Moitri Hospital, staff received a 40-year-old businessman, Zobair Bepari, already dead — a pedestrian who had simply been crossing through the fighting. Another 89 wounded were treated there, five of them shot. Inside the wards, families stepped over bodies and slipped on blood, searching for their own.

On 19 July, at least five children were killed. Three were killed from helicopter sniper fire.  

In Rayerbagh, Jatrabari, four-year-old Ahad stood on his family's balcony when a bullet took his right eye and lodged in his skull. In Narayanganj's Nayamati, six-year-old Riya Gope was on the roof; her father ran up to carry her in, and a bullet found her head as he lifted her so that she died in his arms. In Mirpur 14, 11-year-old Safkat Samir was studying at a table by the bedroom window when a single round passed through his 16-year-old uncle's shoulder and into the boy's eye. In Dhanmondi, 12-year-old Zobaid Hossain Emon was killed by a shot fired, according to the charge later filed, from a RAB helicopter above the crowd.

In Savar's Radio Colony, Al Amin, a 24-year-old Bangladesh Open University student, was shot dead. In Sylhet's Bandarbazar, the journalist ATM Turab of Naya Diganta died after being struck by more than a hundred shotgun pellets. In Bogura, a 16-year-old died of pellet wounds; in Mymensingh, a 17-year-old was killed in a clash between ruling party men and protesters. The dead were not, in the main, rioters. Many were bystanders, schoolchildren and reporters who were hit in the head and the eyes.

The violence radiated across at least 16 districts. In Rangpur, four protesters were shot dead. In Narsingdi, at least two were killed near the Madhabdi municipal office, and a crowd stormed the district jail, freeing hundreds of inmates before setting the building ablaze. In Kishoreganj's Bhairab, police fired from inside a besieged station and wounded more than a hundred students. In Narayanganj, the police bureau's office, five police vehicles and fire service trucks were burnt, and in Jalkuri some 26 buses belonging to the Awami League MP Shamim Osman were torched. Clashes flared in Chattogram, Munshiganj, Barishal, Brahmanbaria, Cox's Bazar and beyond.

The hunt for the leaders

The state, meanwhile, protected its own politics. Having banned gatherings in the morning, the government let the ruling party rally on Bangabandhu Avenue by afternoon, where Quader blamed the opposition for hijacking the movement and called for 'united resistance'. A BNP rally was broken up and the party's Ruhul Kabir Rizvi was arrested near the National Press Club. The movement's own coordinators, Hasnat Abdullah and Abdul Kader among them, insisted the protest was peaceful and non-partisan, disowned the arson, and pressed a set of demands: the resignation of the home and transport ministers, an apology from the prime minister, the removal of the officials who ordered the crackdown, and compensation for the bereaved.

Even as the streets burnt, the state moved against the movement's brain. That night, in Nandipara, the lead coordinator Nahid Islam was taken from a friend's house. The torture inflicted on him in custody would become one of the uprising's defining images of cruelty. 

The count, and the concealment

By the end of the day, at least 148 people were confirmed dead, 62 of them in the capital alone, with more than a thousand injured across those 16 districts. Among them, 54 were killed by a head or neck shot. It is a figure everyone understood to be an undercount, with hospitals unreachable and orders passing quietly to hospitals to limit what they disclosed.

On the longest Friday of that July, a state cut the lights, banned the crowds, put helicopters over the rooftops and told its forces to shoot on sight and then it reached past the barricades to kill the child fetching laundry, the boy at his study table, the girl on her roof. 

The country crossed the Rubicon that Friday. There would be no coming back.