British MP and former city minister Tulip Siddiq, the niece of five-time Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, has condemned the efforts of the Bangladesh authorities, especially the Anti-Corruption Commission (ACC) and the daily Prothom Alo, to malign her.
โFor a whole year now, Bangladesh authorities have peddled lies against me and are now resorting to false documents and I suspect, in time, false evidence. They have not contacted me once or replied to my lawyers.
โThey need to stop generating fake news,โ she said in a post on X.
Speaking to The Guardian, the Labour MP, who is being tried in absentia, spoke out after images of a Bangladeshi national identity card and a passport said to be in her name were published in newspapers in the UK and in Bangladesh.
Siddiq said the documents that appeared in the Times and Prothom Alo, a prominent Bangladeshi newspaper, were forgeries. She said: โIโve struggled with fake news for one year now about all my crimes. No evidence has been produced. So now fake documentation. And I guess the next step is fake evidence.โ
Siddiq and 20 other individuals, including her aunt, her mother, her brother and her sister, have been on trial in the Bangladeshi capital, Dhaka, since the start of August. She is accused of influencing her aunt, Sheikh Hasina, who was ousted as Bangladeshโs prime minister last year, to secure a plot of land in a suburb of Dhaka for her family members.
She denies the allegations, which she says are politically motivated.
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Keir Starmerโs independent adviser on the ministerial code cleared her in January after a series of allegations emerged from Bangladesh, but he had added that it was โregrettable that she was not more alert to the potential reputational risksโ that arose from her familial ties and her Treasury role.
She resigned from her roles as economic secretary to the treasury and city minister, claiming the allegations from Bangladesh were proving a distraction for the government.
The identity documents published last week were said by the newspapers to contradict Siddiqโs previous claims that she had never had a national ID card and that a Bangladeshi passport in her name had expired around two and a half decades ago.
Siddiq said that she stood by these declarations and that her concern now was that the allegedly forged documents could be the start of more โfake newsโ from Dhaka, adding that she had never denied being a Bangladeshi citizen as well as a British national, and that she had informed the Treasury of this on becoming a minister.
The Guardian has seen her declaration to the Treasury proving this to be the case.
Siddiq, who was born in London, has Bangladeshi citizenship due to both parents being born there. She said she also had a Bangladeshi passport as a child, but that it expired when she was about 18 years old and it was not renewed.
She said she did not understand why the allegedly fake documents had been produced, but that it filled her with concern about what was to come, adding: โOne thing they could be doing is that theyโre fabricating these things to see how well it lands, because then theyโre going to fabricate evidence, maybe just to see how much the British press swallow it. It could be something like that.โ
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It was claimed that records show that a passport for Siddiq was issued in London in September 2001, when Siddiq was 19, and a national identity card was issued in January 2011.
It was further claimed that she applied to renew her passport in January 2011 at the Agargaon passport office in Dhaka and that she has a voter registration number.
Siddiq said that none of the claims were true.
A broadcast interview in 2017 has also been cited as evidence that Siddiq, the MP for Hampstead and Highgate, has not been honest about her citizenship.
She had been asked by Channel 4 whether she would intervene in the case of Ahmad bin Quasem, a Bangladeshi lawyer trained in the UK who had allegedly been abducted in Bangladesh.
She responded: โAre you aware I am a British MP? I was born in London. Are you implying that I am a Bangladeshi politician? Because I donโt think thatโs the right thing to imply.
โAre you calling me Bangladeshi? Because I am British, be very careful what youโre saying because Iโm a British MP from Hampstead and Kilburn.โ
Siddiq said that the conversation had been taken out of context by those seeking to traduce her. She said: โI basically said: โSorry, Iโm not Bangladeshi. Iโm British, meaning, Iโm not a Bangladeshi MP, Iโm not taking on casework from a Bangladeshi.โ Thereโs nothing about citizenship.โ
Siddiq added that she had been prevented from having legal representation at the trial in Dhaka and that the authorities had still not contacted her.
The ACC prosecuting Siddiq has claimed that a summons was sent to an address listed on Siddiqโs Bangladesh passport, national identity card and in the voter roll.
Siddiq said she had never lived at the address said to be contained on what she described as โfake documentsโ.
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