The authorities have started moving the Bangladeshi students in Wuhan to the airport in the Chinese city for evacuation from the locked down epicentre of a deadly coronavirus outbreak, reports bdnews24.com.
A Biman Bangladesh plane left the Dhaka airport about 5:45pm on Friday to bring them back.
A total of 361 Bangladeshis, including 19 families, 18 children and two infants, registered for the evacuation, Foreign Minister AK Abdul Momen said earlier.
Reza Sultanuzzaman, a Bangladeshi researcher in China who was involved with making the list of the returnees, said the Bangladeshi students of 21 universities in Wuhan were returning home.
They had already started for Tianhe International Airport by bus, he said in the afternoon local time.
The evacuation flight is scheduled to start for Bangladesh at midnight (10pm Bangladesh time), Sultanuzzaman said.
The 419-seater plane is expected to arrive in Dhaka at 2am on Saturday, Tahera Khandaker, a spokesperson for Biman, told bdnews24.com.
The United States and other countries tightened travel curbs while businesses said they were facing supply problems because of the coronavirus in China on Friday, a day after the World Health Organisation declared a global health emergency.
With the death toll rising to 213, all of them in China, Singapore banned entry to all Chinese visitors and foreigners with a recent history of travel to China in some of the most far-reaching moves worldwide to deter the fast-spreading virus.
