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NEW DELHI: Exiled former Bangladeshi prime minister Sheikh Hasina on Monday denounced the death sentence handed down against her by a domestic war-crimes tribunal as a “rigged” verdict delivered by a court controlled by the unelected interim government that ousted her in August.

In a five-page statement issued by the banned Bangladesh Awami League, Hasina accused Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus, who now leads the country as chief adviser, of weaponizing the International Crimes Tribunal to eliminate her and erase her party from political life. The tribunal, she said, “reveals the brazen and murderous intent of extremist figures” in Yunus’s administration and has no legitimacy because it was set up by a government “no citizen of Bangladesh has cast a vote for.”

Hasina, who fled to India after a student-led uprising ended her 15-year rule, rejected charges that she ordered security forces to open fire on protesters last summer. She insisted she was denied any chance to defend herself, was barred from choosing her own lawyers and was tried in absentia by a court whose judges were purged of anyone sympathetic to her government.

The tribunal, established under Hasina’s own administration to try 1971 war crimes, has been repurposed, she charged, for “personal revenge” against a democratically elected leadership. She repeated her challenge to Yunus to send the case to the International Criminal Court in The Hague, predicting the ICC would acquit her and instead investigate the interim government’s own rights record.

Hasina painted a dark picture of Bangladesh under Yunus, accusing his administration of allowing police to abandon the streets, tolerating attacks on Hindus and other minorities, freeing convicted terrorists while jailing thousands of her supporters, suppressing women’s rights and permitting hard-line Islamists — including members of the radical group Hizb-ut-Tahrir — to gain influence. She claimed economic growth has collapsed, journalists are imprisoned and elections have been delayed while her party remains banned from contesting them.

On the violence that toppled her, Hasina said her government initially allowed peaceful student protests and accepted all their demands. She blamed the subsequent escalation on armed provocateurs who used military-grade weapons to inflame chaos, loot police stations and burn government buildings — acts she said student leaders later boasted about. She accused the tribunal of relying on doctored evidence and coerced witnesses while suppressing records that would exonerate her side.

Hasina disputed the United Nations estimate of roughly 1,400 deaths, saying Bangladesh’s Health Ministry verified only 834 and that the higher figure includes police officers and Awami League supporters killed by protesters. She noted that at least 19 people listed as dead were later found alive and 52 died of natural causes or accidents.

The former leader, who remains Bangladesh’s most polarizing figure, closed by touting her government’s record: joining the ICC, sheltering Rohingya refugees, delivering near-universal electricity access and overseeing a 450 percent surge in GDP that lifted millions from poverty. Yunus and his allies, she said, “can claim no achievements that are remotely comparable.”