Khaleda Zia returns home

Khaleda Zia returns home

Opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party chairperson Begum Khaleda Zia returned home on Saturday evening from the hospital, 53 days after she was admitted to the hospital on April 28.

The former Bangladesh prime minister reached her Gulshan residence in Dhaka from the capital’s Evercare Hospital in the evening as physicians released her. The former prime minister left the hospital at about 8:15pm.

The 74-year-old former prime minister tested positive for Covid-19 on April 11 and negative on May 5. She was admitted to the hospital on April 28 and later shifted to the coronary care unit on May 3.

She was shifted to the general cabin from the CCU on June 3.

Khaleda took treatment at the hospital as the government rejected her family’s application for treatment abroad, party leaders alleged.

According to her family and doctors, alongside post-Covid complications, Khaleda also has been suffering from severe and uncontrolled rheumatoid arthritis, diabetes mellitus, hypertension, cough-variant asthma and an autoimmune disorder that damages moisture-producing glands making it difficult to produce saliva and tears, with a need for bilateral knee replacement.

After she had contracted Covid-19, the condition of her heart, kidney and liver-related complications deteriorated, physicians said.

On May 5, the BNP chairperson’s younger brother Shamim Eskander submitted the application to home minister Asaduzzaman Khan seeking permission to send her abroad for better treatment.

On May 9, he told reporters that the government had rejected the application as Khaleda was a convict and that there was no instance of allowing a convict to go abroad for treatment, though there were precedents of such permission in the country.

Khaleda was released from Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujib Medical University’s prison cell on March 25, 2020 on an executive order on conditions that she would take medical treatment at home and would not leave the country.