Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina is seeking a third five-year term in the Muslim-majority South Asian nation of about 165 million people.

In the forthcoming elections, as always Hasina's Awami League-led Grand Alliance will be locking horns with former prime minister Khaleda Zia's Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) and its allies, which boycotted the 2017 elections.

Zia's BNP in October this year forged a new alliance "Jatiya Oikya Front (National Unity Front)" led by Kamal Hossain, once a stalwart of the Awami League, who left the party in the early 1990s and established his own "Gono Forum" in 1992.

Since February, Zia has been serving a 17-year jail term for a graft conviction, which her party said is politically motivated in an effort to sideline her from politics and elections.

Prime Minister Hasina said the issue of her arch-rival Zia is a matter of court.

She accused the opposition alliance of flexing muscles, killing her party's five leaders and activists and leaving over 400 injured since Dec. 10.

In response, BNP spokesman Sayrul Kabir Khan said more than 11,000 opposition men were arrested in a crackdown since the beginning of electoral campaign on Dec. 10.

At least 152 BNP candidates including party Secretary General Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir were attacked and hundreds of leaders and activists were injured in clashes, Khan claimed.

No police spokesman was available to confirm any figure for the arrests and incidents of pre-polls violence.

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