‘No asylum’ for Saddam’s family
Britain is ‘not in the business’ of granting sanctuary to those connected to barbarous regimes, the Immigration Minister Beverley Hughes has said.
Newspaper reports today suggest that Saddam Hussein’s daughters Raghad and Rana are hoping to live in Leeds with their ten children, near the former dictator’s cousin.
Izzi-Din Mohammed Hassan al-Majid has allegedly been arranging asylum applications for the daughters of the deposed dictator. He told The Sun newspaper that the two women were in financial difficulties.
There has also been speculation that Saddam’s wife, Sajida, is hoping to seek asylum in the UK.
Sajida Hussein, 66, the mother of Rana and Raghad, split from Saddam in the 1980s. She is also the mother of his infamous sons Uday and Qusay, and is believed to be in hiding in northern Iraq with her daughters.
‘What I can say is that we are not in the business, in any way at all, of giving asylum to people who are in any way connected to a barbarous regime’, Beverley Hughes told BBC Radio Four’s ‘The World At One’.
‘If they were to get here and make a claim, we would be bound to consider that claim, but we are starting from a position from which we are not in the business of giving asylum to members of Saddam Hussein’s family’.
Saddam Hussein’s two son-in-laws, the husbands of Rana and Raghad, were assassinated in 1996 after they were enticed back into Iraq after defecting to Jordan.
