Staff Correspondent

Three top leaders of Quota Reform Movement were picked up by the Detective Branch of police from a hospital in the capital on Friday afternoon.

Nahid Islam, Asif Mahmud and Abu Baker Majumder, three top leaders of the Students Against Discrimination, were picked up from Ganashasthya Hospital at Dhanmondi in the capital, according to the AFP news agency.

Two of them were being treated for injuries at the hospital that they said were caused by torture in earlier police custody at another hospital in Dhaka.

"They took them from us," Gonoshasthaya hospital supervisor Anwara Begum Lucky told AFP. "The men were from the Detective Branch."
She added that she had not wanted to discharge the student leaders but police had pressured the hospital chief to do so.

At least 193 people were killed in the ensuing police crackdown and clashes, according to an AFP count of victims reported by police and hospitals, in some of the worst unrest of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina's tenure.

Nahid Islam's elder sister Fatema Tasnim told AFP from the hospital that six plainclothes detectives had taken the three student movement coordinators.

The trio's student group had suspended fresh protests at the start of this week, saying that they had wanted reform of government job quotas but not "at the expense of so much blood".

The moratorium was due to expire earlier on Friday but the group had given no indication of its future course of action.

Nahid Islam, 26, the chief coordinator of Students Against Discrimination, told AFP from his hospital bed on Monday that he feared for his life.

He said two days beforehand, a group of people identifying themselves as police detectives blindfolded and handcuffed him, took him to an unknown location.

Nahid Islam added that he had come to his senses the following morning on a roadside in Dhaka.

Mahmud earlier told AFP that he had also been detained by police and beaten at the height of last week's unrest.

Three senior police officers in Dhaka all denied that the trio had been taken from the hospital and into custody on Friday.

THOUSANDS OF ARRESTS

Police told AFP on Thursday that they had arrested at least 4,000 people since the unrest began last week, including 2,500 in Dhaka.

Student protests began this month after the reintroduction in June of a scheme reserving more than half of government jobs for certain candidates.

With around 18 million young people in Bangladesh out of work, according to government figures, the move deeply upset graduates facing an acute jobs crisis.

Critics say the quota is used to stack public jobs with loyalists to Hasina's Awami League.

The Supreme Court cut the number of reserved jobs on Sunday but fell short of protesters' demands to scrap the quotas entirely.

Hasina has ruled Bangladesh since 2009 and won her fourth consecutive election in January after a vote without genuine opposition.

Her government is also accused by rights groups of misusing state institutions to entrench its hold on power and stamp out dissent, including the extrajudicial killing of opposition activists.