DHAKA: Bangladesh’s army-backed interim government released former Prime Minister Khaleda Zia on bail yesterday after a year in prison on alleged graft charges, paving the way for a credible election to restore democracy.
She was arrested on Sept. 3 last year in an anti-corruption drive by the interim authority, but the High Court granted her bail on Tuesday on the last of four charges she faced.
Analysts said the release of Khaleda and her rival, former Prime Minister Hasina Wajed, who is now on parole, was important to ensure their parties take part in a parliamentary election planned for December that would be fair and peaceful.
“It remains to be seen whether the release of Begum Khaleda and Hasina really ushers Bangladesh to a new brand of politics that we all had hoped for,” said professor Ataur Rahman, chairman of Bangladesh Political Science Association.
“But I suspect the country will roll back into the old politics, putting the interim government’s credibility in ruins,” he told Reuters. Thousands of her supporters and party leaders greeted Khaleda, 63, after she came out of the jail and drove to the graveside of her slain husband, former President Ziaur Rahman.
Later she went to a city hospital and spent two hours with her ailing son and political heir Tareque Rahman, who was expected to fly to Britain last night for treatment of what his doctors say is a broken back bone.
Khaleda heads the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) and Hasina the Awami League — the country’s two biggest political parties, which retain massive popular support, though their top leaders have been tainted by a series of corruption charges.
About 170 key politicians, mostly from the BNP and Hasina’s Awami League, were detained in a huge anti-corruption drive after the interim administration imposed a state of emergency and canceled a national election due in January 2007.
It promised to hold a free, fair and credible election by the end of 2008 after cleansing politics of widespread corruption. But over the past two months more than 50 of the detained leaders have been freed on bail so they can contest the poll.
