Bangladesh president resigns for health reasons

The country’s president, Mohamed Shahabudin, presented his resignation this Friday, citing “medical problems and complications” after serving just over half of his term and just a few months before the possible return to the country of former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, who is in exile in India and has been sentenced to death for crimes against humanity.

“I suffer from several health complications. I have nothing more to add,” stressed the president, a former ally of Hasina herself, whose Government fell in 2024 after strong student protests that resulted in thousands of deaths, according to information collected by the newspaper ‘The Daily Star’.

Previously, several of its representatives had gone to Parliament with a letter in which they reflected their request to leave office. Shahabudin traveled to London last May, where he stayed for about ten days.

Shahabudin was sworn in as president in April 2023 by then Speaker of Parliament Shirin Sharmin Choudhury. Shahabudin was the candidate of Hasina’s Awami League, a party that was in power and which has been outlawed following strong protests under the Anti-Terrorism Law.

At the end of June and in an interview with the Indian television network NDTV, Hasina assured that she will return to Bangladesh this year and emphasized that her party “is not a mere organization but a force.” “Any attack on minorities is an attack on the independence of Bangladesh,” he said then.

Hasina, who has been prime minister twice – from 1996 to 2001 and from 2009 to 2024 – insists that the judicial verdict against her “is not part of Justice” but is an “unconstitutional, illegal and purely political” movement. “The judicial apparatus has been instrumentalized and used for revenge against the Awami League,” he stated.