A new house for Khaleda Zia

DHAKA - Former Bangladesh prime minister Khaleda Zia is to move into a seven-bedroom house in a swank diplomatic area here, her aides said a month after the government evicted her from her Dhaka Cantonment residence where she had lived for almost 40 years.

She will move into the Gulshan area on the first day of the New Year.

Zia has visited the duplex house several times, one of her aides told The Daily Star.

It is located opposite the Russian Embassy and has many foreign missions close by, The Daily Star said Tuesday.

The Sheikh Hasina government had evicted Zia Nov 13 from the government house in Dhaka Cantonment where she had lived since 1972 and even as two-term prime minister.

The high court and later the apex court upheld her eviction, which caused much political acrimony and two dawn-to-dusk strikes.

The government said that Zia had manipulated the allotment and that the site where the house stood was needed to build multi-storeyed homes for the families of army officers who were killed in a border guards mutiny in February last year.