Bangladesh's opposition Awami League on Friday extended by a week its deadline for the caretaker government to purge top officials or face renewed mass demonstrations for fair elections.
"We have given you seven days during which we want to see that you implement all our 11 demands," Awami League leader Sheikh Hasina told a rally attended by 100,000 supporters.
"We want to see that you (the caretaker government) have taken all the effective measures to hold free and fair elections," she said.
"If you fail to implement the people's demands within this deadline we will resume non-stop transport blockades and protests all over the country from November 12," she added.
The Awami League and its 13 leftist allies had set a deadline of Friday afternoon for interim government chief President Iajuddin Ahmed to prove to the opposition's satisfaction it was sufficiently neutral to stage fair elections slated for January.
Earlier the opposition dismissed as insufficient a raft of dismissals by the interim government.
It called for the purging of more top officials, warning otherwise its supporters would renew street protests that claimed 24 lives in the past week.
"We want to see meaningful changes," Abdul Jalil, secretary general of the main opposition Awami League, told AFP.
"We want neutral men for the top bureaucratic positions against whom there are no allegations of bias in favour of the government. But what the government is doing is replacing tainted officials with other tainted officials," he said.
The opposition says the polls will be biased in favour of the outgoing Bangladesh Nationalist Party-led (BNP) government unless certain key officials are removed.
Jalil's statements came as a report by the mass-selling Prothom Alo newspaper quoted two members of the caretaker government's advisory council as saying its chief planned to force out head election commissioner M.A. Aziz.
Jalil also said the caretaker government had promised "proper steps have been taken to reconstitute the election commission."
The dismissal of Aziz and his two deputies is the main point among the opposition's 11 demands.
The Awami League has accused the commission under Aziz's stewardship of producing a list with more than 10 million fake voters while leaving off many of its own supporters.
Violent clashes claimed two dozen lives and left more than 2,000 injured as thousands of people took to the streets after the five-year term of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party-led (BNP) coalition government last Friday.
The caretaker body late Thursday removed a number of top officials including the national police chief and the chief editor of the state-run BSS news agency.
"There will be more big changes Saturday," said A.F.M. Solaiman Chowdhury, secretary of the establishment ministry which oversees government appointments.
Officials of the caretaker administration had appealed Thursday for more time to make reforms.
The caretaker system is aimed at preventing outgoing governments gaining an edge by politicising impartial bodies such as the election commission.