Former Bangladesh prime minister and BNP Chairperson Khaleda Zia returned to her home as a free person on Wednesday after undergoing more than a month’s treatment at a hospital here.
Zia, 79, was acquitted of all charges against her following the fall of the Awami League government led by her arch-rival and prime minister Sheikh Hasina on August 5.
Having been under house arrest for the past five years, this is the first time that Zia, the Chairperson of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) will go home as a free person following a presidential pardon earlier this month, The Daily Star newspaper reported.
Many party activists and senior leaders escorted her home as she left the hospital around 7:00 pm, said Shayrul Kabir Khan, the report quoted a BNP media cell member as saying.
Zia served as the prime minister of Bangladesh from March 1991 to March 1996, and again from June 2001 to October 2006.
Suffering from various ailments, including liver cirrhosis, arthritis, diabetes, and issues related to kidney, lungs, heart, and the eyes, Zia was admitted on July 8.
She will soon be sent abroad for advanced medical treatment, said BNP Secretary General Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir on August 16.
On July 8, she was admitted to Evercare Hospital in the capital, six days after she had been discharged from the same hospital with various ailments.
A group of specialist doctors successfully installed a pacemaker on her on June 23.
Khaleda’s doctors have been recommending sending her abroad since she was diagnosed with liver cirrhosis in November 2021, the UNB news agency reported.
On October 26 last year, three US specialist doctors completed the hepatic procedure known as the transjugular intrahepatic portosystemic shunt (TIPS procedure) to stop water accretion in Zia’s stomach and chest, and bleeding in her liver.
She was lodged in the Old Dhaka Central Jail on February 8, 2018, after a special court sentenced her to five years in prison in the Zia Orphanage Trust corruption case.
On October 30, 2018, the High Court raised her punishment to 10 years. Later, she was convicted in the Zia Charitable Trust corruption case.
Amid the Covid-19 outbreak, the government temporarily freed Zia from jail after 776 days through an executive order, suspending her sentence on March 25, 2020, with conditions that she would stay in her Gulshan house and not leave the country.
On August 6, after the regime change in Dhaka, Zia was completely freed by an order of Bangladesh President Mohammed Shahabuddin.
On Monday, tax authorities decided to unfreeze the bank accounts of Zia, 17 years after they were blocked, indicating the fast-changing political scene in Dhaka after the fall of the Hasina-led government.