Bangladesh arrest warrant issued for British lawmaker linked to ex-Premier Hasina
DHAKA, Bangladesh (AP) — A judge in Bangladesh issued an arrest warrant for British lawmaker and former government minister Tulip Siddiq, a niece of Bangladesh’s former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, who was ousted from her 15-year rule in a mass uprising in August.
The country’s Anti-Corruption Commission has been investigating allegations against Siddiq that she and her family members, including Hasina, illegally received land in a state-owned township project near the capital, Dhaka.
Senior Special Judge of Dhaka Metropolitan Zakir Hossain passed the order on Sunday, after considering charges in three separate cases filed by the Anti-Corruption Commission, the leading Dhaka-based Bengali-language Prothom Alo newspaper reported.
Siddiq, 42, was named in the arrest warrant along with more than 50 others including her mother, Sheikh Rehana, and her brother, Radwan Siddiq, the newspaper reported.
Siddiq said the charges were “a completely politically motivated smear campaign, trying to harass me.”
“There is no evidence that I’ve done anything wrong,” she told reporters in London.
Siddiq’s lawyers also called the charges baseless. “To be clear, there is no basis at all for any charges to be made against her, and there is absolutely no truth in any allegation that she received a plot of land in Dhaka through illegal means,” the law firm Stephenson Harwood said in a statement.
The lawmaker, who represents the north London district of Hampstead and Highgate in Parliament, served in Britain’s center-left Labour Party government as economic secretary to the Treasury — the minister responsible for tackling financial corruption.
She quit that post in January after she was named in an anti-corruption investigation into Hasina and her family in Bangladesh. The investigation alleged that Siddiq’s family was involved in brokering a 2013 deal with Russia for a nuclear power plant in Bangladesh in which large sums of money were said to have been embezzled.
Siddiq said in January that she had been cleared of wrongdoing, but that the issue was becoming “a distraction from the work of the government.”
Hasina’s Bangladesh Awami League party says the charges are politically motivated to destroy the reputation of the prominent family. Hasina’s father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, is Bangladesh’s independence leader. The country gained independence in 1971 under his leadership after a nine-month war against Pakistan.
Hasina has been in exile in India since early August.
After the ouster of Hasina on Aug. 5 last year, Siddiq’s mother’s home in Dhaka’s upscale Gulshan area was looted and vandalized, and so far no police case has been filed over the incident. Hasina accused Bangladesh’s interim administration headed by Nobel Peace laureate Muhammad Yunus of backing mobs to attack her followers across the country. The home affairs adviser says they are trying to restore order in the country.