By IANS
Dhaka : Bangladesh’s Anti-Corruption Commission (ACC) has indicated that it might press charges against former prime minister Khaleda Zia and 30 others, including eight of her former ministers, in a corruption case.
The list of suspects in the case includes Matiur Rahman Nizami, her industry minister who also heads the powerful Jamaat-e-Islami (JeI), the country largest Islamist party.
Two other ex-ministers, Abdul Mannan Bhuiyan and M. Saifur Rahman of Zia’s Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), have since fallen out and floated a rival faction.
They have been have been charged with committing irregularities and corruption in awarding Messrs Global Agro Trade Company (GATCO) the contract for handling containers at the inland container depot in Dhaka and at Chittagong port.
In all, 31 people have been charged in the high-profile graft case.
“We did not recommend exclusion of any of the 31 suspects, named by the investigation officer in the probe report,” a senior government lawyer on the ACC’s panel told New Age newspaper.
Zia’s rival and another former prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, is also in jail on graft charges pressed by the ACC as part of a drive against crime and corruption by the interim government since February.
Chief Advisor Fakhruddin Ahmed, who is performing prime ministerial functions in the government, told a European Union delegation last week that the fate of the two former premiers and other high profile accused or suspects would be decided by “the law of the land” and that there would be no discrimination.