NEW DELHI, July 19 (Reuters) - Telecommunications were

widely disrupted in Bangladesh on Friday amid violent student

protests against quotas for government jobs in which nearly two

dozen people have been killed this week.

French news agency AFP reported that the death toll in

Thursday's violence had risen to 32. Reuters had reported that

13 people were killed, adding to six dead earlier in the week,

and could not immediately verify the higher number.

Authorities had cut some mobile services on Thursday to try

to quell the unrest but the disruption spread across the country

on Friday morning, Reuters witnesses in Dhaka and New Delhi

said.

Telephone calls from overseas were mostly not getting

connected and calls through the internet could not be completed.

Web sites of several Bangladesh-based newspapers were not

updating on Friday morning and their social media handles were

also not active.

Only some voice calls were working in the country and there

was no mobile data or broadband on Friday morning, a Reuters

photographer in Dhaka said. Even SMSes or mobile-to-mobile text

messages were not going through, he added.

The nationwide agitation, the biggest since Prime

Minister Sheikh Hasina was re-elected earlier this year, has

been fuelled by high youth unemployment. Nearly a fifth of the

country's 170 million population is out of work or education.

Protesters are demanding the state stop setting aside

30% of government jobs for the families of people who fought in

the 1971 war of independence from Pakistan.

Hasina's government had scrapped the quota system in

2018, but a high court reinstated it last month. The government

appealed against the verdict and the Supreme Court suspended the

high court order, pending hearing the government's appeal on

Aug. 7.