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Scores of polling stations across Bangladesh have been hit by arson attacks and at least two people have been killed in scattered clashes before Sunday's controversial election.

More than 60 schools due to house polling stations have been hit by arson attacks in the last 36 hours.

The violence came as the main opposition party, the Bangladesh Nationalist party (BNP) – which is boycotting the vote – began a two-day strike in protest at what it called a "scandalous farce".

Its ally, the country's biggest Islamist organisation, has been effectively banned from participating in the election. There will be no voting in nearly half the 300 seats of the national parliament which have already been won by the ruling Awami League party.

The Awami League is expected to win almost all those being contested, though a handful of rebels from the party could cause some upsets.

Tariq Zia, the son of the BNP's leader, Khaleda Zia, called on Saturday for the opposition's four-month-old protest campaign to be intensified in the final runup to the poll in the poor and unstable country of 150 million people.

"A political faction has distorted the idea of Bangladesh we have had until now for its own interests. I call on all of you to utilise all your strength and come out on the street," Tariq Zia said in a videoed message.

Many of the senior officials of the BNP have been imprisoned on charges of fomenting violence and hundreds of lower level workers have been temporarily detained. Khaled Zia herself has been held under effective house arrest in her Dhaka residence.

The BNP decided to boycott the election when the government refused to hand over power to a neutral administration.

However, senior Awami League officials accuse the BNP of refusing a series of compromise offers, including ministerial posts, and say the restrictions and detentions are necessary to "prevent arson killing, burning and destruction of private property".

Gowher Rizvi, a key adviser to the prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, said that postponing the election was not an option.

"Even if the BNP boycott has taken some of the lustre off the election the government had no choice but to go forward. Not to have had an election would have created a legal and constitutional vacuum. There would have been a state without a government," he said.

There has been only one peaceful transfer of power between the parties since the restoration of democracy in Bangladesh in 1991. Each recent poll has been marked by unrest but recent months have been especially violent. Overall, more than 500 people have been killed and at least 20,000 injured in protests, clashes, arson and other attacks in the last year.

Awami League officials admit that the new parliament to be elected on Sunday can at best be considered "transitional" and that new polls will have to be held to seek a convincing mandate.

The European Union, a major market for Bangladesh's massive garment industry, has refused to send election observers, as have the US and the Commonwealth, a grouping of 53 mainly former British colonies.

Some fear that the EU may now suspend trade privileges which aid the garment producers in Bangladesh. Government officials said such a move would be "counterproductive" and lead to massive job losses.

Many voters are angry with both parties as well as worried about violence. The opposition will hail low levels of participation in the poll as a partial victory.

However, patchy enforcement of the strike and blockade indicate that there is little support for the BNP-led protest movement either.

Analysts have variously described the violence as "a tussle between liberal and pro-democratic elements and non-democratic, anti-secular ones""a tussle between liberal and pro-democratic elements and non-democratic, anti-secular ones", an intensification of the contest between factions within the country's elite that has been going since Bangladesh won its independence from Pakistan in a brutal civil war in 1971, or the result of a personal feud between Zia, 68, and Hasina, 66.
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Title: "Bangladesh Polling Stations Sabotaged in Arson Attacks Amid Election Unrest and Violence"
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