Bangladesh’s army chief will meet leaders of student protests on Tuesday as the country waits to form a new government, a day after Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina resigned and fled following a violent uprising against her that killed hundreds.
Student leaders who spearheaded a movement against job quotas that turned into a call for Hasina to resign said early on Tuesday.
“No government other than the one we recommended would be accepted,” Nahid Islam, one of the key organizers of the student movement, said in a Facebook video with three other organizers. “We would not accept any military-backed or military-led government.”
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 microloans of under $100 to the poor in rural Bangladesh, but he was indicted in June on embezzlement charges. denied.
Bangladeshi army chief General Wakeruz Zaman plans to meet protest organizers at 12 noon local time (0600 GMT) on Tuesday, the army said.
Zaman said he had held talks with leaders of the main political parties – with the exception of Hasa’s long-ruling Awami League – to discuss the next course of action and should hold talks with President Mohammed Shahabuddin.
The caretaker government will hold elections as soon as possible after consulting all parties and stakeholders, President Shahabuddin said in a televised address late Monday.
He also said it was “unanimously decided” to immediately release opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) chairperson and Hasina’s nemesis Begum Khaleda Zia, who was convicted in a graft case in 2018 but moved to hospital a year later due to her health. worsened. She denied the charges against her.
A BNP spokesman said on Monday that Zia, 78, was in hospital and would “legally withdraw all charges and come out in the open soon”.
Hasina, 76, has ruled since winning a decade-long power struggle with Zia in 2009. She landed at the Hindon military airport near Delhi on Monday after departing from Dhaka, two Indian government officials told Reuters, adding that India’s national security adviser Ajit Tam Doval met her.
They did not specify her stay or plans. The Indian Express newspaper reported that Hasina had been taken to a “safe house” and was likely to travel to the United Kingdom. Reuters could not immediately verify the report.
