The Dhaka Special Court in Bangladesh on Monday sentenced former prime minister Sheikh Hasina to ten years in prison on two corruption indictments.
The court also sentenced Hasina’s two nieces, her nephews, and others involved in the alleged corruption schemes.
Hasina, now 78 years old, resigned her office and fled to India in August 2024 after a month of massive protests against her government. Over 300 people were killed in the demonstrations, including at least 90 who died storming her official residence on the day of her departure.
Hasina had been in power since 2009, the longest-serving prime minister in the history of her country. She later claimed that the U.S. government orchestrated her downfall because she refused to give America control of a strategic island in the Bay of Bengal.
The protests that drove her from office began with student groups marching against an elaborate and opaque quota system, originally designed by Hasina’s father Sheikh Mujb Rahman, the first leader of independent Bangladesh.
The quota system set aside a large number of lucrative government jobs for “freedom fighters” who participated in the war for independence from Pakistan in the early 1970s. As the original ranks of the “freedom fighters” dwindled, the quota system mutated to benefit their descendants and other favored groups, prompting accusations of corruption and patronage.
The demonstrators also accused Hasina of being an authoritarian, an argument she lost by ordering a remarkably brutal crackdown, complete with an Internet blackout – much as the Iranian regime would do to its own demonstrators in January 2026.
In October 2025, the interim government officially outlawed Hasina’s political party, the Awami League, which was still one of the largest parties in Bangladesh even after Hasina was driven from office.
In November 2025, a war crimes court in the Bangladeshi capital of Dhaka sentenced Hasina to death in absentia for ordering the death of some 1,400 demonstrators. Hasina, speaking from exile in India, denounced the verdict as a “farce” produced by a “kangaroo court.”
Monday’s convictions stemmed from allegations filed by the Anti-Corruption Commission (ACC), the national corruption watchdog agency. The ACC accused Hasina and her relatives of abusing government power to manipulate the sale of six plots of land near Dhaka. The land was supposed to be used in the construction of a new residential complex called the Purbachal New Town Project, which would include over 25,000 residential plots. The accused have denounced the allegations as politically motivated fabrications.
The Dhaka court sentenced Hasina to two sentences of five years each on two different cases related to the land deal. Her nephew Radwan Mujib Siddiq and niece Azmina Siddiq were sentenced to seven years each, while her niece Tulip Siddiq was sentenced to four years. Several other individuals outside the Hasina clan were also hit with jail sentences of six months to a year, plus hefty fines.
The case has an awkward international dimension because Tulip Siddiq lives in the United Kingdom and is a member of the British parliament under the ruling Labour party. She and her aunt both received four-year sentences in a previous trial related to the Purbachal New Town Project. Sheikh Hasina has two other convictions on top of that, giving her a total of 26 years in prison even before Monday’s ruling.
The Bangladeshi military on Monday called on the U.K. to “arrest and hand over the fugitive Tulip and her wanted family members to the Bangladesh Law Enforcement agencies immediately.”
The Labour party responded that it “cannot recognize this judgment” because Tulip Siddiq “has not had access to a fair legal process in this case, and has never been informed of the details of the charges against her.”
“This is despite repeated requests made to the Bangladeshi authorities through her legal team,” a Labour spokesman added.
Bangladesh is preparing to hold elections on February 12 for the first time since Hasina’s ouster. Since Hasina’s Awami League has been banned, the main contenders are the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) and Jamaat-e-Islami (JIB).
BNP has criticized Hasina and her party for being too close to India, while the Islamist JIB party was opposed to Bangladesh becoming independent from Pakistan in the first place. The outcome of the election is therefore likely to be a pivot away from India and toward Pakistan and China, although India has signaled it would feel better about a BNP administration.
On Monday, Sheikh Hasina’s son Sajeeb Ahmed Joy called on citizens to boycott the “rigged” vote in February.
“Terrorists are ruling in Bangladesh. Yunus is working on behalf of those Islamic extremists. Many innocent people have been killed. Many Awami League workers and police officers have been killed even though the party is not in power,” he said. Muhammad Yunus is the interim president who took over after Hasina was ousted.
Joy claimed the United States is secretly supporting BNP for its own purposes and terrorist groups like al-Qaeda and Lashkar-e-Taliban are “openly” meddling with the election. He hinted that mail-in ballots could be abused to manipulate the election results.
