DHAKA: A day after ousted Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina resigned and fled the country amid nationwide protests, the country’s parliament has been dissolved, President Mohammed Shahabuddin’s office confirmed in a statement.
The dissolution of parliament comes hours after protesting student leaders set a deadline to dissolve parliament and warned that a “strict program” would be launched if the deadline was not met.
In a Facebook video with two other student leaders, Nahid Islam, one of the key organizers of the anti-Hasina movement, set a 3pm deadline for the dissolution of parliament and called on “revolutionary students to be ready” if that happens. didn’t happen
The decision to dissolve parliament was taken after meetings with defense chiefs, political party leaders, student leaders and some civil society representatives, the president said in a statement.
Bangladeshi army chief General Waker-Uz-Zaman was due to meet student leaders to discuss the formation of an interim government to hold elections soon after taking over.
It was not immediately clear whether the meeting took place and whether the students’ deadline to dissolve parliament did not come until after the meeting.
General Zaman announced Hasina’s resignation on Monday after days of violent protests in which around 300 people were killed.
The general also announced the formation of an interim government.
Opposition leader Khaleda Zia released
The country’s former prime minister Khaleda Zia has been released from years of house arrest, Bangladesh National Party (BNP) spokesman AKM Wahiduzzaman told AFP.
Zia’s dismissal, which was also confirmed by the president’s office, comes after student leaders had already proposed the name of Nobel Peace Prize laureate Muhammad Yunus as the interim government’s chief adviser.
Yunus, 84, and his Grameen bank won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for work to lift millions of people out of poverty by providing small loans of under $100 to the poor in rural Bangladesh, but he was indicted in June on embezzlement charges. denied.
Known as a “banker for the poor”, he briefly flirted with a political career and in 2007 attempted to found his own party. However, his ambitions were widely seen as inciting the ire of Hasina, who accused him of “sucking the blood of the poor”. .
In 2011, Hasina’s government removed him as the head of Grameen Bank, saying that at 73 he had exceeded the legal retirement age of 60. Thousands of Bangladeshis formed a human chain to protest his firing.
This January, Yunus was sentenced to six months in prison for violating labor law. He and 13 others were also indicted by a Bangladeshi court in June on charges of embezzling 252.2 million taka ($2 million) from the social security fund of the employees of the telecommunications company he founded.
Although he has not been jailed in either case, Yunus faces more than 100 other cases on graft and other charges. The Nobel laureate denies any involvement and told Reuters in an interview that the allegations were “very flimsy, made-up stories.”
Yunus is currently in Paris for a minor medical procedure, his spokesman said, adding that he had agreed to a request from students campaigning against Hasina to become a top adviser to the interim government.
