The fifth anniversary of the death of former president and Jatiya Party founder Hussain Muhammad Ershad will be observed on Sunday.

The Jatiya Party and its associate bodies have taken upelaborate programmesto mark the anniversary with due respect.

As part of the programmes, the leaders and activists of the party and its different associate bodies will place wreaths on the portrait of Ershad at 9amon the premises of the party headquarters at Kakrail. A doa mahfil and memorial meeting will be arranged at the Institution of Engineers, Bangladesh (IEB) at 3pm, the party said in a press release.

Jatiya Party Chairman and leader of the opposition in parliament, GM Quader, will preside over the meeting. The Jatiya Party flag will be kept at half-mast atop all the offices of the party across the country. Besides,all divisions, districts, cities, upazilas, thanas, and union units of JaPa will hold separate discussion meetings, milads, and doa mahfils in observance of the death anniversary of their former chairman.

In Rangpur, Jatiya Party leaders and activists will offer fateha at the grave of Ershad and pay homage to him by placing wreaths on Sunday morning. A doa mahfil-cum-discussion meeting will also be held onthe grave premises of Ershad.

General Ershad, who was ousted in 1990 after his nine years of autocratic rule, died on July 14, 2019, at the age of 89 while undergoing treatment at the Combined Military Hospital (CMH), Dhaka. Amid political turmoil following the assassination of Ziaur Rahman in a military coup, Ershad took over state power from then-President Abdus Sattar on March 24, 1982, as the Chief Martial Law Administrator (CMLA).

He formed the Jatiya Party in 1986 and was elected president of the country for a term of five years that same year through the third parliamentary election, triggering huge protests by other political parties. Amid a fierce combined movement by the opposition parties, he was finally forced to step down on December 6, 1990.