- The interim government announces special mourning and prayers throughout the country.
- Police launch a manhunt and offer a reward for the arrest of the suspects.
- Muhammad Yunus says the attack aims to derail upcoming polls.
A leader of Bangladesh’s 2024 uprising, injured in an assassination attempt and flown to Singapore for treatment, has died in the city-state, officials said Friday.
A week ago, masked assailants shot dead Sharif Osman Hadi, spokesperson for the student protest group Inqilab Moncho, 32, as he left a mosque in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, injuring his ear.
“Despite doctors’ best efforts…, Mr. Hadi succumbed to his injuries,” Singapore’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement, adding that it was helping Bangladeshi authorities repatriate his body.
Inqilab Moncho first announced Hadi’s death in a Facebook post, saying: “In the fight against Indian hegemony, Allah accepted the great revolutionary Osman Hadi as a martyr. »
Hadi was a candidate in the February 2026 elections, the first parliamentary polls since a student-led uprising toppled the autocratic rule of former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina last year.
He was flown to Singapore on Monday for treatment.
In Dhaka, the interim government led by Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus confirmed Hadi’s death.
“I express my deepest condolences. His passing is an irreparable loss for the nation,” Yunus said.
“The country’s march toward democracy cannot be stopped by fear, terror or bloodshed,” he said in a televised speech.
The government also announced special prayers in mosques after Friday prayers and a half-day of mourning on Saturday.
Hadi was a senior leader of the student protest group Inqilab Mancha and has been an outspoken critic of India – Hasina’s former ally, where the deposed prime minister remains in self-imposed exile.
Manhunt against armed men
Bangladesh police have launched a manhunt for the attackers who shot Hadi, releasing photos of two key suspects and offering a reward of five million taka (about $42,000) for information leading to their arrest.
Yunus, 85, a Nobel Peace Prize winner who led Bangladesh until elections on February 12, said last Saturday that the shooting was a premeditated attack carried out by a powerful network, without providing a name.
He said the conspirators’ “goal is to derail the elections,” adding that the attack was “symbolic – intended to demonstrate their strength and sabotage the entire electoral process.”
Muslim-majority Bangladesh, a nation of 170 million people, will vote directly to elect 300 lawmakers to its parliament, with another 50 selected from a list of women.
A referendum on a historic democratic reform package will take place on the same day.
Tensions are high as parties prepare for elections and the country remains unstable.
Hasina, convicted in absentia last month and sentenced to death, has refused to return to attend her trial. It remains hidden in India, despite repeated requests from Dhaka for New Delhi to hand it over.
The last elections, held in January 2024, gave Hasina a fourth consecutive term and her Awami League 222 seats, but were decried by opposition parties as a sham.
The Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), led by three-time former prime minister Khaleda Zia, is widely tipped to win the upcoming elections.
Zia is in intensive care in Dhaka, and his son and political heir Tarique Rahman is expected to return from exile in Britain after 17 years on December 25.
