Dhaka  - A court in Dhaka on Monday asked Bangladesh's former primer Khaleda Zia and a few of her ex-cabinet colleagues to appear in court by next Sunday in a graft case.

Accepting the charge sheet, pressed Sunday by an anti-corruption investigator against 15 others in a coalmine corruption case, the Metropolitan Session Judge, Mohammad Azizul Haq, also issued a warrant for the arrest of nine other officials of her 2001-2006 cabinet of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party-led alliance government.

The court asked Zia and her immediate-past cabinet ministers Abdul Mannan Bhuiyan, M Shamsul Islam, M K Anwar and Matiur Rahman Nizami, among others, to surrender before the court on October 12, a court offiical said.

After seven months of investigation into alleged corruption, the anti-corruption commission approved the charge sheet against Khaleda and her party deputies late in September for illegally awarding a contract for operating the Barapukuria coalmine to a Chinese company.

The investigation officer of the case mentioned that the accused incurred a heavy loss to the public exchequer by illegally awarding the contract to the China National Machinery Import and Export Corporation, abusing the state power.

Zia, also the chief of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, who has been implicated in four graft cases since the military-backed government of Fakhruddin Ahmed took over in January 2007, was arrested by the army-led joint forces on September 3, 2007.

She was released on bail on September 11, 2008 for four months.

The other ex-primer of the country, Sheikh Hasina Wajed, was also arrested in graft cases, and now is paroled for medical treatment abroad. (dpa)