Bangladesh's January 5 election could be postponed, organizers said, after more deadly violence Wednesday between security forces and supporters of opposition parties which are threatening to boycott the polls.

Less than two days after the election commission fixed the date for the polls, senior officials indicated they could be pushed back to accommodate demands by opposition parties who want Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina to make way for a neutral caretaker government.

Bangladesh opposition supporters blocked roads and ripped up railway tracks Tuesday in protests against the announcement of an election date, leaving four people dead and plunging the nation into fresh turmoil.

The Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) and its Islamist allies called a 48-hour nationwide blockade to press their demand for a suspension of the January 5 general election date announced Monday evening.

Police clashed Tuesday with opposition supporters demanding that the Bangladesh government drop a plan to hold general elections on Jan. 5 in the latest round of political violence in the country.

Police and TV stations said at least two people have died in the violence since late Monday when authorities announced the election date.

Bangladesh police fired rubber bullets and tear gas at garment workers who stitch clothes for Western retailers during clashes on Tuesday as demonstrations against low wages intensified, an officer said.

Some 40,000 workers downed tools and took to the streets in the Ashulia export zone on the outskirts of Dhaka for the second day, forcing around 200 factories to suspend production, police and factory owners said.

Bangladesh cabinet ministers submitted their resignations Monday to allow Prime Minister Sheihk Hasina to form an all-party government to prepare for polls, a plan rejected by the opposition which wants a neutral caretaker government.

The move comes as the impoverished South Asian country has been gripped by a four-day nationwide general strike to force Hasina's ruling Awami League to stage the elections under a technocrat-led government.

Bangladesh has launched a crackdown on the main opposition, arresting senior leaders after their party called a nationwide strike to force Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina to resign and call elections under a caretaker government.

Police said three top Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) leaders, including an ex-deputy prime minister, were arrested late Friday and two key aides of main opposition leader Khaleda Zia including a leading businessman were taken into custody early Saturday.

The U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights on Wednesday expressed "serious alarm" at death sentences handed down by a Bangladesh court to 152 soldiers over the massacre of scores of army officers in 2009.

Navi Pillay called the crimes committed in the mutiny "heinous". But she added in a statement from Geneva that "justice will not be achieved" by conducting "trials that failed to meet the most fundamental standards of due process".

Bangladesh has defended the death sentences handed to 152 soldiers for mutiny, insisting Wednesday that those convicted would have an opportunity to appeal and denying claims that confessions were extracted through torture.

"The convicts have at least two tiers of appeal," Law Minister Shafique Ahmed said, the day after a court in Dhaka delivered its verdicts against 823 soldiers who were on trial over a bloody mutiny nearly five years ago.

A Bangladeshi court sentenced at least 150 soldiers to death and jailed hundreds more on Tuesday over a 2009 military mutiny that left scores of top officers massacred.

Some 823 soldiers were charged with murder, torture and other offenses over the mutiny, in which 74 people were hacked to death and burnt alive before their bodies were dumped in sewers and shallow graves.

A Bangladesh war crimes court sentenced a British-based Muslim leader and a U.S. citizen to death in absentia for murder Sunday, in the latest ruling over atrocities committed during the war of independence.

Britain's Chowdhury Mueen-Uddin and Ashrafuzzaman Khan, from the United States, were found guilty by the much-criticized International Crimes Tribunal of 11 charges relating to the slaughter of 18 intellectuals during the 1971 conflict.