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 flew after being deposed by the 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”.
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. She called for the ban on her party to be lifted before elections due in February.
Hasina is also charged with crimes against humanity relating to forced disappearances during the Awami League's rule in another case at the same tribunal in Bangladesh. Hasina and the Awami League deny all the charges.
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.
She was first elected to power in 1996. She earned credit for signing a water-sharing deal with India and a peace deal with tribal insurgents in the south-east of the country. But at the same time, her government was criticised for numerous allegedly corrupt business deals and for being too subservient to India.
Observers say that her reign has been marked by extraordinary economic growth but also shocking human rights abuses, drawing stark comparisons between her past and present political persona.
