DHAKA: Sheikh Hasina once helped rescue Bangladesh from military rule but her long rule came to a sudden end on Monday as protesters stormed her palace in Dhaka.
Her 15 consecutive years in power were marked by an economic rebirth but also by the mass arrest of political opponents and human rights sanctions against her security forces.
Protests began in July with rallies led by university students against civil service job quotas but soon escalated into deadly unrest and demands that she step down.
Attacks on demonstrators by police and pro-government student groups last month also sparked international condemnation.
The autocratic Hasina, 76, won a fifth term as prime minister in January but the opposition boycotted a vote it said was neither free nor fair.
After fleeing Dhaka, Bangladesh’s Sheikh Hasina lands in India, CNN News18 says
Critics accused her government of a litany of rights abuses, including the murder of opposition activists.
The daughter of a revolutionary who led Bangladesh to independence, Hasina presided over breakneck economic growth in a country once written off by US statesman Henry Kissinger as an irredeemable “basket case”.
She promised last year to turn all of Bangladesh into a “prosperous and developed country” but around 18 million young Bangladeshis are out of work, according to government figures.
Economic rise
Hasina was 27 and travelling abroad when renegade military officers murdered her father, prime minister Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, and her mother and three brothers in a 1975 coup.
She returned six years later to take the reins of her father’s Awami League party, beginning a decade-long struggle that included lengthy stretches of house arrest.
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