Bangladesh court issues arrest warrant for British MP linked to ex-premier Sheikh Hasina

DHAKA, Bangladesh — A judge in Bangladesh issued an arrest warrant for the British member of Parliament and former Labor Minister Tulip Siddiq, who is a niece of Bangladesh’s former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, who was ousted in August last year in a mass uprising that ended her 15-year rule.

The country’s official 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 Dhaka, the capital.

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, the Hampstead and Highgate MP, who quit as economic secretary to the Treasury in January, 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 faces a number of allegations of corruption involving her family in Bangladesh, but her aunt Hasina’s Bangladesh Awami League party said 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.

The BBC quoted Siddiq’s lawyers saying the charges against Siddiq were “politically motivated.”

Siddiq, who was responsible for tackling corruption in financial markets, was named in December in an anti-corruption investigation in Bangladesh against Hasina. 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 quit as minister in January amid controversy. She said she had been cleared of wrongdoing but that the issue was becoming “a distraction from the work of the government.”

Siddiq, 42, is a former local councilor who was elected lawmaker for a north London district in 2015. She was appointed to the government after Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s center-left Labor Party won a landslide election victory in July last year.