Online Desk: BNP Chairperson Khaleda Zia’s medical board today said there was nothing more they could do to treat her. “We have done all that we can with whatever we have in hand. Now we have nothing to do,” Shahabuddin Talukder, chief of the medical board, told journalists at a press briefing at Evercare Hospital in the capital. FM Siddique, member of the medical board, said the former prime minister is not getting proper treatment, and is receiving temporary or adhoc treatment. She needs liver transplant immediately and this facility is not available in Bangladesh, he said. On October 1, the government has turned down the plea from Khaleda Zia’s family for allowing her to go abroad for better treatment, citing legal grounds.

The law ministry gave this opinion after reviewing for the second time Section-401 of the Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPC) under which Khaleda’s jail sentence was suspended, he pointed out. “According to the existing law, there is no scope for granting the application to let BNP Chairperson Khaleda Zia go abroad,” Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan Kamal told reporters on the same day. The 76-year-old is suffering from various ailments, including liver cirrhosis, arthritis, diabetes, kidney, lung, heart, and eye problems.

Since her conditional release in 2020, the BNP chief is receiving treatment at the hospital under a medical board headed by cardiologist Prof Shahabuddin Talukder. On August 9, Khaleda Zia was admitted to Evercare Hospital after falling seriously ill at her Gulshan residence Feroza by the decision of her medical board. Khaleda was sent to the Old Dhaka Jail after a lower court sentenced her to five years’ imprisonment in the Zia Orphanage Trust corruption case on February 8, 2018. Later, she was found guilty in another corruption case the same year. Amid the coronavirus outbreak, the government temporarily freed Khaleda Zia from jail through an executive order suspending her sentence on March 25, 2020, with the condition that she stay in her Gulshan house and not leave the country.