Word: truck
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...such a widespread manner. Nearly every rung of society is being terrorized. Truck drivers are assaulted on the roads; leading businessmen have been kidnapped for ransom; journalists have been tortured and murdered; and one of the nation's pre-eminent intellectuals, Humayun Azad, was almost killed in February by a gang of knife-wielding assailants. But the wake-up call for many Bangladeshis came last week, when the bodies of two cloth merchants were found beheaded and mutilated in a forest outside Dhaka. Stunned by the discovery, many traders in the city closed their shops or held rallies to highlight...
...even though Bangladeshis have long grumbled about the daily bribes they have to pay, an etiquette of corruption, honored by extortionists and victims alike, has made life bearable for many years. Mahafuzur Rahaman Bahar, a member of the Bangladesh Truck Drivers' Union, says drivers once operated according to a "token" scheme. By paying a fixed sum to the first extortionist they encountered, they received a colored-paper token imprinted with the sign of a tree or a cow, which guaranteed free passage to their destination. So long as corruption operated within the defined rules of a scheme, Bangladeshis got along...
...result: his workers were attacked on their way to work, and the extortionists threatened to do damage to his factories. In the end, he closed one of them down. For truckers, the token scheme ceased to function about a year ago. The result is that on average a truck on its way from Dhaka to the port city of Chittagong, the country's most important commercial route, is stopped 8-12 times by extortionists. Trucks are frequently hijacked at night, and drivers who attempt to fight off the hijackers are sometimes shot. Bahar says 35 drivers were killed last year...
...Compounding the chaos is political paralysis. Many Bangladeshis say routine corruption morphed into rampant extortion after the 2001 parliamentary election, when the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) came to power with the aid of fundamentalist Islamic allies. A wide cross-section of Bangladeshis, from prominent businessmen to shopkeepers to truck drivers, complains that the government has failed to crack down on lawlessness. "The general perception is that corruption has worsened under the present regime," says TI's Murshid. The rise in extortion and violence has led the opposition Awami League (AL) to organize repeated strikes to try to force the government...
...small but significant development in their anti-jihadist efforts: their first turncoat. Riadh Jelassi, 33, was sentenced to jail for 31/2 years, and wrote prosecutors last September saying he would sing to avoid deportation to his native Tunisia. In extensive interrogations, he has described plots to drive suicide truck bombs into...