According to accounts, the 76-year-old escaped to India in a helicopter on Monday after thousands of protesters besieged her official residence in the city, Dhaka.
This marks the unexpected end to the reign of Bangladesh’s longest-serving Prime Minister, who has been in power since 2009 and has ruled the country for more than 20 years.
Ms Hasina began her political career as a pro-democracy icon and has since been credited with supervising the South Asian country’s economic success.
However, in recent years she has been accused of becoming dictatorial and suppressing any challenge to her leadership.
Politically motivated arrests, disappearances, extrajudicial executions, and other violations have all increased under her tenure.
In January, she won a historic fourth term as Prime Minister in an election widely condemned as a fraud and boycotted by the main opposition.
How did Sheikh Hasina rise to power?.
Ms. Hasina was born into a Muslim household in East Bengal in 1947, and politics was in her blood.
Her father was nationalist leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, Bangladesh’s “Father of the Nation,” who led the country’s independence from Pakistan in 1971 and served as its first president.
Ms. Hasina had already established herself as a student leader at Dhaka University.
