Bangladesh's longest-serving prime minister Sheikh Hasina Wazed began her political career as a pro-democracy icon, but fled mass protests against her rule in August 2024 after 15 years in power.
Since then, Hasina has been in self-imposed exile in India, where she fled after being deposed by a student-led uprising which spiralled into nationwide unrest.
On 17 November, a special tribunal in Dhaka sentenced her to death after convicting her of crimes against humanity. It was found Hasina had ordered a deadly crackdown on protesters between 15 July and 5 August 2024. She denied all charges against her.
Up to 1,400 people were killed during the weeks of protests leading up to her ousting, most by gunfire from security forces, UN human rights investigators said. Their report found that she and her government had tried to cling to power using systematic, deadly violence against protesters.
It was the worst bloodshed the country had seen since independence in 1971.
The protests brought an unexpected end to the reign of Hasina, who had ruled Bangladesh for more than 20 years.
She and her Awami League party were credited with overseeing the South Asian country's economic progress. But in recent years she was accused of turning autocratic and clamping down on any opposition to her rule.
Politically-motivated arrests, disappearances, extra-judicial killings and other abuses all rose under her rule.
In January 2024, Hasina won an unprecedented fourth term as prime minister in an election widely decried by critics as being a sham and boycotted by the main opposition.
Protests began later that year with a demand to abolish quotas in civil service jobs. By summer they had morphed into a wider anti-government movement as she used the police to violently crack down on protesters.
Amid increasing calls for her to resign, Hasina remained defiant and condemned the agitators as 'terrorists'. She also threw hundreds of people into jail and brought criminal charges against hundreds more.
A leaked audio clip suggested she had ordered security forces to use lethal weapons against protesters. She denies ever issuing an order to fire on unarmed civilians.
Some of the bloodiest scenes occurred on 5 August, the day Hasina fled by helicopter before crowds stormed her residence in Dhaka. Police killed at least 52 people that day in a busy neighbourhood, making it one of the worst cases of police violence in the country's history.
Hasina, who has been tried in absentia, called the tribunal a 'farce'.
It is a kangaroo court controlled by my political opponents to deliver a pre-ordained guilty verdict... and to distract the world's attention from the chaos, violence and misrule of [the new] government, she told the BBC in the week before her verdict.
Born to a Muslim family in East Bengal in 1947, Hasina had politics in her blood.
Her father was the nationalist leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, Bangladesh’s ‘Father of the Nation’ who led the country’s independence from Pakistan in 1971 and became its first president.
At that time, Hasina had already established a reputation as a student leader at Dhaka University.
Her father was assassinated with most of his family members in a military coup in 1975. Only Hasina and her younger sister survived as they were travelling abroad at the time.
After living in exile in India, Hasina returned to Bangladesh in 1981 and became the leader of the Awami League, the political party her father belonged to.
She joined hands with other political parties to hold pro-democracy street protests during the military rule of General Hussain Muhammed Ershad. Propelled by the popular uprising, Hasina quickly became a national icon.
Once one of the world’s poorest nations, Bangladesh achieved credible economic success under her leadership from 2009.
Its per capita income tripled in the last decade and the World Bank estimates that more than 25 million people have been lifted out of poverty in the last 20 years.
Much of this growth has been fuelled by the garment industry, which accounts for the vast majority of total exports from Bangladesh and has expanded rapidly in recent decades, supplying markets in Europe, North America and Asia.
But Hasina has long been accused of enacting repressive authoritarian measures against her political opponents, detractors and the media - a remarkable turnaround for a leader who once fought for multi-party democracy.
Rights groups estimate there have been at least 700 cases of enforced disappearances, with hundreds more subject to extra-judicial killings, since Hasina took power again in 2009. Hasina denies involvement in these.
