B´desh Court Charges Ex-PM Hasina in Graft Case

In the event of a guilty finding, Hasina and her co-accused could appeal to a higher court, the officials said.

A Bangladesh court formally charged former prime minister Sheikh Hasina with extortion on Sunday after weeks of checking prosecution evidence.

Court officials said her trial would begin on Jan. 17 with witnesses to be cross-examined by attorneys for the state and the defendants, and a verdict would be handed down within 60 days.

In the event of a guilty finding, Hasina and her co-accused could appeal to a higher court, the officials said.

Hasina, her cousin and former minister Sheikh Selim, and Hasina's only sister, Sheikh Rehana, are jointly accused of illegally taking 30 million taka ($440,000) from a businessmen when Hasina was in power.

Rehana now lives abroad and will be tried in absentia.

On Sunday, the Dhaka Metropolitan Sessions judge, Mohammad Azizul Haque, read out the charges in court, in the presence of Hasina and Selim.

The court sat in a house near the building in Dhaka's sprawling parliament compound where Hasina has been held since her arrest in July.

She faces a second charge, due in court soon, involving the alleged extortion of 50 million taka from a businessman during her term in office. Hasina denies both charges.

Another detained former prime minister, Begum Khaleda Zia, is being held in another house in the same compound, and she too is likely to face trial for graft soon.

The two women are bitter rivals, alternating as leader of the impoverished south Asian country for 15 years until October 2006. They are said not to have spoken to each other for a decade.

The so-called "Battling Begums" would be expected to play key roles in the election that the army-backed interim government has vowed to hold before the end of the year. But if convicted they would be barred from the race, legal experts say.

Hasina's personal physicians appealed last week to the interim government to let her go to the United States for medical treatment. The government has yet to respond.

The interim administration, headed by former central bank chief Fakhruddin Ahmed, took over on Jan. 11, 2007 after months of political violence. It has since detained more than 170 political figures.

It placed the country under an indefinite state of emergency, which Hasina's Awami League and Khaleda's Bangladesh Nationalist Party want to see lifted soon.