• Bangladesh on 06.08.2018 promised to introduce the death penalty for deliberate road deaths in a bid to quell more than a week of demonstrations calling for better road safety, as new student-led protests were met with tear gas and rubber bullets.
• The protests sparked last week after two teenage students — a boy and a girl — were killed when two buses racing to pick passengers, a common occurrence in the city, hit them and wounded several others. One of the bus drivers fled the scene, although both were later arrested.
• The government rushed the new draft of the Road Transport Act 2018 to the Cabinet amidst pressure from student protesters for safe roads and an unannounced strike by bus operators in response to the demonstrations.
• The Cabinet today approved the Road Transport Act 2018 with provisions of highest five years of rigorous imprisonment for reckless driving while the term was three years.
• Law Minister Anisul Huq told a separate briefing that if police investigations found drivers to have deliberately caused accidents to kill someone, they would face death penalty under the country’s penal code.
• The lengthy standoff, attracting foreign media interest and criticism from the UN and rights groups, has turned into a major test of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina's government ahead of December elections.
• Law and Justice Minister Anisul Huq said the Cabinet has approved a new law allowing for the death penalty “if an investigation finds that the death in a road accident has been caused deliberately”.
• Rights group Amnesty International called on the government to stop its violent crackdown on overwhelmingly peaceful student protesters.
• Bangladesh appeared to be one of the world’s worst accident prone countries with the World Bank saying more than 4,000 people die in road accidents each year.
• More than 4,200 pedestrians were killed in road accidents in Bangladesh in 2017, a 25% increase from 2016, according to private research group the National Committee to Protect Shipping, Roads and Railways.