Police in Bangladesh today arrested the former prime minister Khaleda Zia as part of the interim government's campaign against corruption.
Ms Zia is the second former prime minister to be detained in the anti-corruption drive. Her arch-rival, Sheikh Hasina Wajed, has been held since July on blackmail charges.
Police also arrested Ms Zia's son Arafat Rahman Coco. A court refused bail to Ms Zia and sent her to jail pending a trial, her lawyer, Rafiqul Islam Miah, told reporters at the court. Mr Coco was to remain in police custody for seven days while investigators questioned him.
Hundreds of police officers escorted Ms Zia from court to a makeshift jail near the parliament building in the capital, Dhaka.
Bazlur Rahman, the editor of Dhaka's Sangbad daily, said the prosecution of the two leaders had more to do with politics than curbing corruption.
"It now seems that they [the government] want to weaken the two large political parties to prevent them from winning the next election," Mr Rahman told the Associated Press. "I think the government wants to hold the election, but a hand-picked parliament is what it wants."
The government has denied the allegation.
Bangladesh has been ruled since mid-January by an interim government, installed by the military, after 30 people were killed in clashes at the end of Ms Zia's term. National elections planned for January were cancelled.
The government, led by the former central bank governor Fakhruddin Ahmed, has vowed to fight corruption, reform electoral rules and clean up the country's factional politics before the next elections.
Ms Zia, who ended her five-year term in October, allegedly misused her power as prime minister and awarded contracts in connection with cargo terminals to the local company Global Agro Trade Company when she was in office in 2003.
Golam Shahriar Chowdhury, an official of the anti-corruption commission, filed the case overnight in Dhaka.
Meanwhile, a new case was filed late yesterday against Sheikh Hasina on charges of taking bribes in return for allowing a company to build a power plant when she was in power in 1997, a police official said. Sheikh Hasina, who ruled the country from 1996 to 2001, was arrested in mid-July and faces half a dozen charges of corruption and murder.
Ms Zia and Sheikh Hasina have dominated Bangladesh's politics since their joint campaign ended years of military rule and restored democracy in 1990.
The two women head the country's two biggest parties and their supporters - many of them jailed on corruption charges - have frequently engaged in deadly street clashes.
Sheikh Hasina and her Awami League party have rejected all of the corruption charges against her, saying they were politically motivated and aimed at preventing her from taking part in elections expected sometime between October and December next year.
Ms Zia was catapulted into politics in the early 1980s when her husband and military strongman, Ziaur Rahman, was assassinated in a coup. She became the Muslim-majority country's first female prime minister in 1991 after democracy was restored.
But the leader of the Bangladesh Nationalist party (BNP) has been under virtual arrest since April when attempts to send her into exile in Saudi Arabia failed after Riyadh reportedly refused to give her a visa.
Bangladesh, an impoverished country of 145 million people, has been ranked as one of the world's most corrupt countries by the Berlin-based anti-corruption watchdog Transparency International.
At least six former ministers from both the Awami League and the BNP have already been tried for corruption and misuse of power.