Zia, 79, has been in declining health for years, is confined to a wheelchair with rheumatoid arthritis, and also suffers from diabetes and cirrhosis of the liver.
Until Thursday, she had kept out of the spotlight despite her release, apart from briefly addressing a political rally in a video message from a hospital bed.
Zia’s Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) said that more than two dozen of its leaders were also in attendance.
Party secretary general Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir lost his composure and broke into tears when he saw Zia at the event, newspaper Prothom Alo reported.
Zia spent most of her sentence under house arrest after she was relocated from prison during COVID-19, but she was denied repeated requests to travel abroad for medical treatment.
Alamgir told a Wednesday rally in the city of Feni that Zia was “very ill, having been kept in jail on false charges in a small, damp cell”.
Bangladeshi media outlets reported in October that Zia was expected to travel abroad for medical care in the near future, without giving a precise date.
