Renowned economist Muhammad Yunus will lead a new interim government in Bangladesh after the country’s embattled prime minister Sheikh Hasina fled following weeks of protest.
Yunus called for calm as he boarded a flight to Bangladesh from Paris where he had been receiving medical treatment, according to the Australian Associated Press.
"Be calm and get ready to build the country. If we take the path of violence everything will be destroyed," he said in a statement.
Yunus was chosen by Bangladesh President Mohammed Shahabuddin to lead the new government — a key demand of student demonstrators.
He has said he wants to hold elections "within a few months".
'Banker to the poor'
Yunus was born in 1940 in the seaport city of Chittagong and studied at Dhaka University in Bangladesh, according to his profile on .
He received a Fulbright scholarship to study economics at Vanderbilt University in the United States.
In 2006, Yunus was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for founding Grameen Bank, offering small loans to ordinary people without requiring collateral.
The pioneering bank's stated mission is to eradicate poverty through the concept of 'microlending', and Yunus has won numerous international awards for his work.
In 1998, Yunus was the inaugural recipient of Australia's only international award for peace,.
On receiving this prize he delivered a lecture titled Peace Is Freedom from Poverty.
'Politically motivated charges'
In January, Yunus was sentenced to six months in prison by a Dhaka labour court which found one of his companies had failed to create a workers' welfare fund.
Yunus was immediately bailed and the charges were described as politically motivated by watchdogs including Amnesty International.
The human rights organisation reported that the trial was one of more than 150 cases against Yunus after Hasina's Awami League party came to power in 2008.
Agnès Callamard, secretary general of Amnesty International, said in 2023: "Mohammad Yunus' case is emblematic of the beleaguered state of human rights in Bangladesh, where the authorities have eroded freedoms and bulldozed critics into submission."
