DHAKA, Oct 7: The installation of a new Bangladesh government under premier-elect Khaleda Zia of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) will take place on October 10, officials said Sunday.

The swearing-in ceremony for Zia and her new cabinet has been “refixed for Wednesday at 7:00 pm”, a presidential palace spokesman said.

Zia, whose Islamist-allied BNP-led coalition won last week’s parliamentary elections with a two-thirds majority, was to have been sworn-in Monday as the country’s 14th prime minister, but the ceremony was deferred, officials said earlier.

A spokesman for Zia, who is to meet her party’s newly-elected MPs in Dhaka later Sunday, told AFP the BNP had accepted the new schedule for the oath-taking.

The decision to delay the ceremony followed a reported request from outgoing parliamentary speaker Abdul Hamid, of the defeated Awami League, who said he needed time to conduct the oath-taking of the new deputies.

Under the constitution the president administers the oath of office to the new prime minister and members of the cabinet only after they have been sworn-in as MPs by the speaker.

BNP leader Abdul Mannan Bhuiyan Sunday protested against the delay, saying the party wanted the oath-taking to be completed as soon as possible so the new government could immediately begin dealing with the country’s law and order problems.

But he added that the party would abide by the decision made by Hamid and President Shahabuddin Ahmed.

Bangladesh’s election authorities have already brushed aside demands from the defeated Awami League to hold a new ballot.

Party chief and outgoing prime minister Sheikh Hasina Wajed has alleged vote-rigging in the October 1 polls and has threatened protests and a boycott of parliament unless fresh elections are, sparking fears over the stability of politically volatile and impoverished Bangladesh.

Zia Sunday appealed to Sheikh Hasina to shun the path of confrontation and take part in parliament as an effective opposition party.

“I appeal to you... let us meet and discuss all problems anywhere you want,” she told a meeting of her BNP-led alliances’s newly-elected MPs in Dhaka.

At her own party meeting in Dhaka Sunday, a defiant Sheikh Hasina asked her party’s rank and file to go ahead with the planned anti-election protests.

“We are not against going to parliament, but what can we do when people’s votes were stolen and rigged,” she was quoted by the Ekushey television network.

Foreign diplomats have already begun congratulating Zia and offering to cooperate with her new government.

The United States said it accepted the results despite the opposition’s protests.

“The election was well carried out,” State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said in Washington Friday.

Bangladesh’s media and business groups have continued to pile pressure on Sheikh Hasina to accept the election and to reconsider her decision to stay away from parliament.—AFP