Former Prime Minister of Bangladesh Khaleda Zia Passes Away

Dhaka: Former Prime Minister of Bangladesh and Chairperson of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), Khaleda Zia, has passed away at the age of 80.

She had been suffering from multiple illnesses including liver disease, diabetes, and heart conditions. She had been on a ventilator for several days and was undergoing treatment at a private hospital in Dhaka.

According to hospital sources, she passed away at 6:00 a.m. local time. Doctors stated that her condition had been declared extremely critical a day earlier.

Medical board member Dr. Zia-ul-Haq said that Khaleda Zia was on life support and was receiving regular dialysis. He added that stopping dialysis would have caused her condition to deteriorate rapidly, and due to her advanced age and complex medical conditions, it was no longer possible to treat all her illnesses simultaneously.

Khaleda Zia was born in 1945 in Dinajpur district of Bengal. She married Ziaur Rahman in 1960. In 1984, she was elected Chairperson of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party. After winning the 1991 elections, she became Prime Minister.

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She was regarded as one of Bangladesh’s most prominent political figures. She served as Prime Minister from 1991 to 1996. In 1996, she was re-elected but resigned after just one month due to opposition protests.

Khaleda Zia again served as Prime Minister from 2001 to 2006. She was Bangladesh’s first female Prime Minister and also became the second woman Prime Minister in the Muslim world, after Pakistan’s Benazir Bhutto.

During her political career, she faced several corruption charges and in 2018 was sentenced to five years in prison. Her long-standing political rivalry with Sheikh Hasina Wajed, leader of the Awami League, remained a defining chapter in Bangladesh’s political history.