Consumers on Wednesday continued to suffer in getting fuel oil across Bangladesh with a little improvement in the situation in the Dhaka city as the government refrained from hiking prices of petroleum products.

Bangladesh Petrol Pump Owners Association convener Syed Sajjadul Karim lambasted the tendency of some of the pump owners of withholding stocks for profiteering, deepening the crisis amid the ongoing conflict in the Gulf states, critical to Bangladesh like many others for energy supply.

Despite the availability of fuel oil as claimed by the government, consumers continued to face long queues and rationing.

The government on Tuesday decided to keep the prices of petroleum products unchanged for April, forcing operators to sell a litre of diesel at Tk 100, kerosene at Tk 122, petrol at Tk 116 and octane at Tk 120.

A consumer said that he waited for half an hour to get octane worth Tk 1,500 from a station near the Matsya Bhaban in the capital Dhaka at about 3.30pm.

But another consumer at a station on Kazi Nasrul Islam Avenue said that he was able to buy petrol worth Tk 200 after waiting in a queue for one and a half hours.

Sajjadul Karim said that the government had instructed unofficially not to keep the pump stations closed so that consumers were not got panicked.

To stop panic buying, the government agencies are continuing to make drives to recover horded fuel oil.

On Wednesday, an Energy Division press release said that 13,980 litres of diesel were recovered from two hoarders in Narayanganj by mobile courts.

Modus operandi of the planned fuel oil cards aiming at checking hoarding and panic buying was on Wednesday demonstrated at the Energy Division.

Officials, however, said that the preparations of the cards, meant for octane and petrol consumers, were at the preliminary stage.

It will be piloted at a number of city stations soon, they said.

Bangladesh Petroleum Corporation officials said tanker with 27,300 tonnes of diesel from Malaysia had been unloading the item since early Tuesday.

They are expecting two more oil tankers in the next week.

State-owned Bangladesh Sangbad Sangstha on Wednesday reported that foreign minister Khalilur Rahman had requested the United States to grant Bangladesh a special waiver to import refined diesel and other petroleum products from Russia.

The request was made during a meeting with US energy secretary Chris Wright at the Department of Energy in Washington DC on Tuesday, according to a message received in Dhaka on the day.

Khalilur explained that Bangladesh could not take advantage of the earlier limited world-wide waiver by the US on Russian oil at sea since none of the tankers were bound for Bangladesh at that time.

On Tuesday, Monir Hossain Chowdhury, a joint secretary at the Energy Division, at a briefing at the secretariat said that the current diesel stock was 1,28,939 tonnes, petrol stock 11,431 tonnes and octane stock 7,940 tonnes.

Without detailing the schedules of the vessels, he said that 1.5 lakh tonnes of diesel would be imported in April.