| All that weeping has left her dehydrated and depleted of key salts (and non-key salts as well, but nobody cares about them). |
Don't shoot, coppers! I'm comin' out!
leader at risk by refusing to let her personal doctors treat her inside prison.
Three-term PM of Bangla, widow of deceased dictator Ziaur Rahman, head of the Bangla Nationalist Party, an apparent magnet for corruption ...
, the 72-year-old leader of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) who was jugged
Don't shoot, coppers! I'm comin' out!
in February for corruption, has been suffering complications from arthritis and is struggling to walk, doctors say.
A team of four government doctors from a state-run hospital in Dhaka have been treating Zia, a two-time former prime minister, in prison where she is serving her five-year sentence in isolation.
But her supporters want Zia's personal physicians given access to her cell.
The government has yet to respond to the request.
"The government is trying to break our leader's morale and it is taking a toll on her health," BNP front man Rizvi Ahmed told AFP.
Mohammad Shamsuzzaman, an orthopaedic specialist at Dhaka Medical College Hospital who visited Zia as part of the government team, said her condition was not serious but her arthritis had worsened in prison.
"She has pain in hands and legs. She couldn't walk 50 metres without assistance," he told AFP, adding she had also developed back pain.
Zia, an erstwhile ally turned fierce political rival of Prime Minister
...Bangla dynastic politician and current Prime Minister of Bangladesh. She has been the President of the Bangla Awami League since the Lower Paleolithic. She is the eldest of five children of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the founding father of Bangla. Her party defeated the BNP-led Four-Party Alliance in the 2008 parliamentary elections. She has once before held the office, from 1996 to 2001, when she was defeated in a landslide. She and the head of the BNP, Khaleda Zia show such blind animosity toward each other that they are known as the Battling Begums..
, already suffered from arthritis, diabetes and knee replacements when she was sentenced to prison for embezzlement.