Off the wire
• 14 sentenced over deadly pipeline blast  • Chinese shares close higher Monday  • Cambodian, Chinese entrepreneurs meet to explore business opportunities  • test file  • Australian club pleads guilty to safety breaches under supplements regime  • Kobe Bryant to retire after 2015-16 season  • Suns bench combine for 51 points to beat Raptors  • Head of Afghan private TV channel assassinated in Kabul  • China takes big step in electricity system reform  • Cleanup operations kill insurgents in Afghanistan: ministry  
You are here: 　 Home

Bangladeshi ex-PM gets bail in graft case

Xinhua, November 30, 2015 Adjust font size:

A court in Bangladesh's capital Dhaka has granted bail to ex-Prime Minister Khaleda Zia in a case filed by the country's anti-graft body.

Judge Aminul Islam of the Special Judge's Court Monday granted bail to Khaleda Zia after she surrendered before the court and sought bail in the graft case filed for allegedly awarding a contract to a foreign firm causing huge loss to the exchequer.

On June 18 this year, a High Court division bench cleared the way for the trial proceedings to resume and ordered Khaleda Zia, also chairperson of Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), to surrender before the trial court within two months after receiving the court order.

On Monday at about 12:00 p.m. (local time) Khaleda Zia's motorcade reached the court premises where thousands of BNP members had gathered to welcome her.

Sanaullah Miah, a counsel for Khaleda Zia, said Dec. 28 has been fixed as the next date for hearing the case which was stuck for the last seven years until Bangladesh's Anti-Corruption Commission (ACC) moved to revive it earlier this year.

ACC filed the Niko graft case in 2007 after the BNP chief was arrested by the then military-backed caretaker government.

A total of 11 people, including Khaleda Zia, former Bangladeshi Law Minister Moudud Ahmed and former State Minister for Energy AKM Mosharraf Hossain, were charged on May 5, 2008 for allegedly causing a loss of 137 billion taka (some 1.76 billion U.S. dollars) to the state exchequer by awarding gas exploration job to a Canadian company, Niko Resources.

Zia had earlier said political vendettas were to blame for the cases against her and her sons. Enditem