- Student leaders had set 3pm as the deadline for the dissolution of parliament.
- Former Prime Minister and opposition leader Khaleda Zia has been released from house arrest.
- Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus is likely to be part of the interim government.
A day after ousted Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina resigned and fled the country due to nationwide protests, the country's parliament has been dissolved, President Mohammed Shahabuddin's office confirmed in a statement.
The dissolution of parliament comes hours after protesting student leaders set a deadline to dissolve parliament and warned that a “strict program” would be launched if the deadline was not met.
Nahid Islam, one of the key organisers of the anti-Hasina movement, in a Facebook video with two other student leaders, had set 3pm as the deadline for dissolving parliament and called on “revolutionary students to be ready” if that did not happen.
The decision to dissolve parliament was taken after meetings with heads of defence forces, political party leaders, student leaders and some representatives of civil society, according to the presidential statement.
Bangladesh Army Chief General Waker-Uz-Zaman was due to meet student leaders to discuss the formation of an interim government that is expected to hold elections soon after assuming power.
It was not immediately clear whether the meeting took place and whether the students' deadline to dissolve parliament came after the meeting.
General Zaman announced Hasina's resignation on Monday after days of violent protests in which around 300 people were killed.
The general also announced the formation of an interim government.
Opposition leader Khaleda Zia released
Former Prime Minister Khaleda Zia has been released after years of house arrest, Bangladesh National Party (BNP) spokesman AKM Wahiduzzaman said. AFP.
Zia's release, also confirmed by the president's office, comes as student leaders have already proposed the name of Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus as a senior adviser to the interim government.
Yunus, 84, and his Grameen Bank won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for their work to lift millions out of poverty by providing small loans of less than $100 to Bangladesh's rural poor, but in June a court charged him with embezzlement, charges he has denied.
Known as the “banker of the poor”, he briefly flirted with a political career and attempted to form his own party in 2007. But his ambitions were widely seen as drawing the ire of Hasina, who accused him of “sucking the blood of the poor”.
In 2011, Hasina's government removed him as head of Grameen Bank, arguing that at 73 he had exceeded the legal retirement age of 60. Thousands of Bangladeshis formed a human chain to protest his dismissal.
In January this year, Yunus was sentenced to six months in prison for labour law violations. In June, a Bangladeshi court also charged him and 13 others with embezzling 252.2 million taka ($2 million) from the workers' welfare fund of a telecom company he founded.
Although he was not jailed in any of the cases, Yunus faces more than 100 other cases of corruption and other charges. The Nobel laureate denies any involvement and said during an interview with ReutersThe accusations were “very flimsy and fabricated stories.”
Yunus is currently in Paris undergoing a minor medical procedure, his spokesman said, adding that he has accepted the request of the students who led the campaign against Hasina to be the interim government's chief adviser.
