Pair nabbed over bridge remarks

Bangladesh police have arrested two men for social media posts deemed critical of a new bridge that had been trumpeted by the government as one of its greatest achievements.

The Padma Multipurpose Bridge was inaugurated on the weekend in a ceremony attended by almost a million people, after a long construction plagued by delays and corruption allegations.

Its opening caps a key infrastructure goal by Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, and her government’s fanfare over the project has been matched by a hardline response to any criticism.

One man was arrested on Monday after a Facebook post in which he expressed a desire to take a photograph of himself urinating on the bridge, according to local media reports.

Police confirmed to AFP the arrest of Abul Kalam Azad, a former low-level official of the opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), without clarifying the nature of the remarks.

His arrest came on the same day police detained a TikTok user who allegedly posted a short video showing that bolts used to fasten the bridge together could be easily unscrewed.

Bayazid Talha was taken into custody in Dhaka on Monday after his post went viral. A senior police officer said that Mr Talha had made the video to “smear” the reputation of the government.

Neither man has been formally charged with an offence but both were scheduled to appear in court yesterday to be remanded into custody.

The 6.4-kilometre bridge, which took nearly eight years to build, ends an bottleneck that required freight destined for the country’s poor south to be slowly ferried over the Padma river.