Bangladesh has released Begum Khaleda Zia, the chair of the main opposition party, from house arrest, the president’s office announced.
Zia, 78, who twice held the post of prime minister, was convicted in a corruption case in 2018 and sentenced to 17 years in prison.
The head of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) was moved to a hospital a year later as her health deteriorated. She has denied the charges against her.
Zia was an archrival of former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, 76, who resigned and fled the country on Monday.
On Tuesday, President Mohammed Shahabuddin announced Zia’s release from house arrest and dissolved parliament after calls from the student-led national movement.
Zia had led the BNP since 1981 after her husband, then-president Ziaur Rahman, was assassinated in an attempted military coup. She became Bangladesh’s first woman prime minister a decade later.
Despite having ruled between 1991 and 1996 and from 2001 to 2006, Zia’s terms in office were marred by corruption allegations.
As part of a deal to allow Zia to resume political life, her two sons – also accused of corruption during her second term – relocated to the United Kingdom.
The announcement of her release came after the army chief, General Waker-Uz-Zaman, was meeting student leaders to discuss the formation of an interim government that is expected to hold elections soon after it takes over.
Meanwhile, the country’s key police association on Tuesday apologised for actions against “innocent students” during the crackdown on protesters and demanded the release of its jailed officers.
“Until the security of every member of the police is secured, we are declaring a strike,” the Bangladesh police association said in a statement.
It argued its officers had been “forced to open fire”, and that they had been cast as the “villain”.
The families of political prisoners jailed in Bangladesh under Hasina waited desperately for news of their relatives, as some of those missing were released.
Among the most prominent of those released on Tuesday was opposition activist and lawyer Ahmad Bin Quasem, a British-educated barrister son of Mir Quasem Ali, the former leader of Jamaat-e-Islami who was hanged in 2016 after his final appeal was rejected by the Supreme Court.
Security forces during Hasina’s rule were accused of detaining tens of thousands of opposition activists, killing hundreds in extrajudicial encounters, and disappearing their leaders and supporters.
Human Rights Watch last year said security forces had committed more than “600 enforced disappearances” since Hasina came to power in 2009, and nearly 100 people remain unaccounted for.
Hasina’s government denied the allegations, saying some of those reported missing drowned in the Mediterranean while trying to reach Europe.
“We need answers,” Sanjida Islam Tulee, coordinator of Mayer Daak, told the AFP news agency. The group, whose name translates as The Call of the Mothers, has been campaigning for the release of detained people.
