When Mir Ahmad bin Qassem was abducted from his home in Bangladesh at night by armed men, his four-year-old daughter was too young to understand what was happening.
“They dragged me away, I was barefoot,” he told me, crying. “My youngest daughter was running behind me, wearing my shoes, saying, “Daddy, take me away,” as if she thought I was going to disappear.”
He was handcuffed and blindfolded and held in solitary confinement for eight years, and it is still unknown where or why this happened.
The 40-year-old British-trained barrister is one of Bangladesh’s so-called “disappeared persons”. These are people who criticized Sheikh Hasina, who served as the country’s prime minister for two terms and for more than 20 years before stepping down in August last year.
Hasina’s government presided over the worst violence Bangladesh has experienced since its 1971 war of independence, in which at least 90 people were killed while she was clinging to power in her final days in power. A hundred people were killed.
Hasina is also the aunt of Labor MP Tulip Siddique, who is also controversial in her own right. He resigned as Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer’s anti-corruption minister last week after denying a series of corruption allegations.

These included allegations that Mr Siddique’s family had embezzled up to £3.9 billion from Bangladeshi infrastructure spending and that Mr Siddique was using a London property linked to an ally of his aunt. .
The government’s ethics watchdog later found she had not breached the ministerial code, but Siddique resigned anyway.
However, this is not necessarily the end of the problem.
Question for Starmer
The episode raises troubling questions about Mr Starmer’s judgment and Labour’s approach to winning over the Bangladeshi vote.
Questions are swirling as to why Labor could not have seen this coming, given that it had known for some time about Mr Siddiq’s relationship with his scandal-hit aunt. Bin Qassem’s case was first brought to her attention in 2016.
He and other Bangladeshi “disappeared” people have expressed awkward tension over Siddique’s publicly expressed views on human rights in the years since.
For example, she has campaigned for years for the release of her constituency, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, from Iran, while criticizing her suffering and extrajudicial killing under her aunt’s regime in Bangladesh. clearly displayed a relatively indifferent attitude in his public statements.
Siddique has previously attended meetings with Russian President Vladimir Putin with his aunt and appeared on BBC television as a spokesperson for Hasina’s Awami League party since 1981.
Mr Siddique also thanked Awami League members for supporting Labor’s parliamentary elections in 2015. Two pages on her website containing links to the party in 2008 and 2009 were later removed.
But once in parliament, Siddique told reporters that he had “no ability or desire to influence Bangladeshi politics.”
So while these connections were not a secret, they were probably not seen as a bad thing within the Labor Party, especially since it has shown little sign of distancing itself from the Awami League in recent years.
The then Labor MP Jim Fitzpatrick told the House of Commons in 2012 that the two parties were “sister organisations” and that many of his colleagues shared that warmth.
And Starmer, who joined parliament in 2015 at the same time as Siddique in the neighboring seat, has met Hasina on a number of occasions.
This included a meeting in 2022 when the then Prime Minister of Bangladesh was in London for Queen Elizabeth II’s funeral, a meeting Bin Qassem called “heartbreaking and shocking.”

Starmer’s allies insisted his meeting with Hasina was “totally legitimate” and not an endorsement of her policies.
It is clear that Labor has been trying to get Bangladesh on its side for many years, but this may reflect political realities here in the UK, particularly in parts of the capital.
“You can’t succeed in East London without understanding the Bangladeshi vote,” explains the veteran Labor campaigner.
But those who don’t understand the country’s divided and volatile politics could end up angering the very people they’re trying to attract. “We need to carefully balance our words and our actions,” campaigners say. “If you are too explicit against a political party (in Bangladesh), you will be criticized.”
According to the FT’s analysis, there are at least 17 British constituencies where the voting-age Bangladeshi population is greater than Labour’s majority.
Mr Starmer’s Holborn and St Pancras constituency has at least 6,000 adult residents from Bangladesh.
potential blind spots
It was this combination of warmth and political pragmatism that Mr Starmer, immediately after winning the July election, appointed Mr Siddique as Chancellor of the Exchequer, with responsibility for leading Britain’s anti-corruption efforts. Did it cloud my judgment about the storm?
“Mr Starmer has a blind spot for his friends and political allies,” a Labor source said. “It’s nothing new.”
Investigative journalist David Bergman, who has spent a decade uncovering Siddique’s connections to Bangladeshi politics, says context is everything. “It wasn’t a big topic until the Labor Party came to power, Tulip Siddique became a minister and the Awami League government collapsed,” he says.
He insists someone within the party should have raised concerns years ago. “Tulip Siddique’s failure to respond to enforced disappearances in Bangladesh had a blind spot,” Bergman argues.
“Then there was a blind spot as to how connected she was to the British Awami League.”
When I mentioned this to one of the Labor MPs, he said that not only the Labor Party but also the British media had a blind spot in Bangladesh.
“There are approximately 600,000 British-Bangla diasporas,” they say. “We are the eighth most populous country on earth, but we haven’t heard a peep (from the British media) since the events of August 5.”
The corruption investigation into Hasina is expected to continue for some time, and Starmer’s top team could take on further issues during the months that Siddique remains a Labor MP.
For Bin Qasem, the fall of Hasina’s government meant she was suddenly woken up in a cell, bundled into a car and dumped in a ditch, and finally allowed to return home to her two daughters.
She was a toddler when we last saw her in 2016, but she is now a young woman. “I couldn’t really recognize them, and they couldn’t recognize me,” he tearfully told me.
“Sometimes it’s hard to bear not being able to see my daughters grow up.
“I missed out on the best years of my life. I missed their childhood.”