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DHAKA: 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.

LONDON: Outdated laws unfit for the social media age hampered police from countering false claims that helped fuel anti-immigrant violence in Britain last summer, an investigation by lawmakers said Monday.
Parliament’s Home Affairs Committee said limits on disclosing details of criminal investigations “created an information vacuum that allowed disinformation to flourish” after three children were stabbed to death at a summer dance party in July.
The attack in the northwest England town of Southport shocked the country and triggered days of disorder after far-right activists seized on incorrect reports that the attacker was a Muslim migrant who had recently arrived in the UK
Over several nights, crowds attacked housing for asylum-seekers, as well as mosques, libraries and community centers, in the worst street violence Britain had seen since riots in 2011.
Attacker Axel Rudakubana, who was 17 when he carried out the rampage at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class, is the British-born son of Rwandan Christian parents. He is serving a life sentence with no chance of parole for 52 years for killing Alice Da Silva Aguiar, 9, Elsie Dot Stancombe, 7, and Bebe King, 6, and wounding eight other children and two adults.
Longstanding contempt-of-court rules, intended to ensure fair trials, hampered police in correcting online misinformation, and a ban on naming suspects under 18 meant the attacker’s identity was withheld from the public for several days.
A tweet falsely identifying the attacker, posted on the day of the stabbings, was retweeted thousands of times and viewed by millions of people, the lawmakers said. Police did not state that the information was false until the next day, and even then did not release the attacker’s name.
Conservative lawmaker Karen Bradley, who heads the Home Affairs Committee, said “bad actors sought to exploit the unspeakable tragedy that unfolded in Southport.”
“By failing to disclose information to the public, false claims filled the gap and flourished online, further undermining confidence in the police and public authorities,” she said. “The criminal justice system will need to ensure its approach to communication is fit for the social media age.”
The committee of lawmakers from both government and opposition parties also said police struggled to monitor the sheer volume of content on social media. It called for government support “to monitor and respond to social media at a national level.”
The government said it agreed that “social media has put well-established principles around how we communicate after attacks like this under strain, and we must be able to tackle misinformation head on.” It has asked the Law Commission to carry out a review into contempt of court rules.
The government also has set up a public inquiry into how the system failed to stop the killer, who had been referred to the authorities multiple times over his obsession with violence.
The lawmakers’ committee, which heard from police, prosecutors and experts during its inquiry, also said there was no evidence to support allegations of “two-tier policing” in Britain. Politicians and activists on the political right have argued that those arrested over the summer disorder were treated more harshly than climate change activists or Black Lives Matter protesters.
More than 1,000 people have faced criminal charges over the violence, which saw 69 police officers treated in hospitals.
“Those participating in disorder were not policed more strongly because of their supposed political views but because they were throwing missiles, assaulting police officers and committing arson,” the lawmakers said. “It was disgraceful to see the police officers who bore the brunt of this violence being undermined by baseless claims of ‘two-tier policing.’”