Bangladesh is unlikely to reissue a passport for former prime minister Sheikh Hasina, who is now exiled in India after she was ousted in the face of a mass uprising in 2024.
State Minister for Foreign Affairs Humayun Kobir said on Thursday that the government would not issue any passport for the “fugitive to return home”.
Hasina, who left the country on August 5, 2024, by an army aircraft amid a violent uprising, has said in repeated online conversations that she would return to Bangladesh in December.
Soon after the installation of an interim administration headed by Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus, Hasina's passport was scrapped.
Bangladesh, during Yunus's tenure, repeatedly asked India to extradite Hasina as per an extradition treaty signed earlier between Dhaka and Delhi.
The Bangladesh Nationalist Party-led government of Tarique Rahman, which assumed office in February 2026 through an election, has also been trying to bring Hasina back through the extradition process, as a court in Dhaka in November 2025 sentenced Hasina to death for “crimes against humanity” for the brutal handling of the 2024 uprising.
"Sheikh Hasina is a fugitive, a flagged terrorist and a terrorist. Has she come to visit her in-laws' home in Rangpur that she needs to be given a passport, and she will come if given a passport?" said State Minister Kobir.
He said this in response to a journalist's question while seeing off a Chinese delegation led by Liu Haixing, Minister of the International Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC), at Hazrat Shahjalal International Airport in Dhaka.
"We have an extradition treaty with India. This treaty is for apprehending terrorists and criminals. A passport is not needed to apprehend a terrorist criminal; a judicial process is needed," he said.
He said, "This fugitive terrorist, who fled after killing thousands of people, we cannot in any way view her as an ordinary commercial traveler. We demand her handover."
The criminal must be handed over in accordance with the extradition treaty that exists between the governments of Bangladesh and India, the state minister added.
