Bangladeshi police fired rubber bullets and tear gas at thousands of garment workers Monday as they demanded a wage hike at a protest in a manufacturing hub outside the capital Dhaka.

Police said they reacted after workers blocked a key highway in the Ashulia industrial area, home to hundreds of factories which make clothing for Western retailers such as Walmart.

Hundreds of garment factories in a Bangladesh manufacturing hub reopened Friday, days after they were closed down due to unrest sparked by the country's worst industrial tragedy, employers said.

Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association shut down the factories at the Ashulia industrial area on the outskirts of the capital Dhaka earlier this week after tens of thousands of workers went on the rampage.

A cyclone slammed into the Bangladesh coast on Thursday, forcing the evacuation of a million people, but fears of devastating damage eased when the storm weakened as it moved over land.

Authorities breathed a sigh of relief after Cyclone Mahasen, which was packing winds of 100 kilometers an hour (60 miles) when it powered into the low-lying southeastern coast, lost much of its punch after making landfall.

Hundreds of thousands of people in Bangladesh and Myanmar were ordered Wednesday to move to safety as a cyclone barrelled towards low-lying coastal areas.

The United Nations has warned that more than eight million people could be at risk from Cyclone Mahasen, which is expected to make landfall on Thursday or Friday somewhere near the border between the two countries.

The death toll in Bangladesh's worst industrial disaster on Friday soared past 1,000 after more bodies were found in the rubble of a collapsed nine-storey building outside the capital Dhaka.

Army spokesman Captain Shahnewaz Zakaria told Agence France Presse that the "death toll now stands at 1,006" as the recovery operation entered its 17th day since the building caved in at Savar town, 30 kilometers (20 miles) southwest of Dhaka.

At least eight people have been killed in a fire that swept through a garment-making factory in the Bangladeshi capital, with the owner among the victims, police said Thursday.

The cause of the fire was not known but authorities said it broke out during the night on the third floor of an 11-storey building housing two garment factories in the capital's Darussalam district.

Bangladeshi opposition parties have called a two-day nationwide shutdown from Wednesday to protest what they describe as the "mass killing" of Islamists in a crackdown by security forces.

The main opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) and its Islamist allies called the strike after saying that hundreds of people died on Sunday and early Monday, when police broke up a mass rally in central Dhaka.

Hundreds of survivors of Bangladesh's worst industrial disaster blocked a main highway to demand wages Tuesday as the death toll from the collapse of a nine-storey building passed 700, officials said.

More than 3,000 garment workers were on shift at the Rana Plaza complex at the time of the collapse on the morning of April 24, making clothing for Western retailers such as Britain's Primark and the Spanish label Mango.

The death toll from Bangladesh's worst industrial disaster surpassed 650 Monday after dozens of bodies were pulled from the wreckage of a nine-storey building housing garment factories, the army said.

Major Manzur Elahi of the army control room, which was set up to coordinate the rescue operation following the disaster last month, told AFP that recovery efforts had gathered pace and the "death toll now stands at 654".

At least 28 people have died in street battles between Bangladeshi police and tens of thousands of Islamists, officials said Monday, deepening the divide between the secular government and religious hardliners.

In some of the fiercest violence to rock the capital since independence four decades ago, hundreds more people were reported to have been injured as riot police broke up a mass rally near a key commercial district.