This account begins at a busy junction on Whitechapel High Street, in the heart of London’s East End.
Tucked between Sports Direct and Betfred is the office of Apanjon, a name well known among the area’s sizeable Bangladeshi community. Roughly translated from Bengali, it means ‘one’s own people’.
The name carries particular significance for an organisation that campaigns for equality and justice for LGBT people in both Bangladesh, where homosexuality remains criminalised, and the United Kingdom.
Founded in 2017 under the slogan ‘love knows no gender’, Apanjon offers welfare support and hosts regular social and cultural activities for the community.
For years, there appeared to be little controversy surrounding its work. Its website’s public gallery shows a colourful collection of photographs, mostly featuring young men at Christmas celebrations, monthly meet-ups, restaurants and Pride events, often wearing matching T-shirts.
Now, however, questions have been raised over whether all the men pictured are genuinely gay, or whether some may have claimed to be LGBT in an attempt to strengthen asylum applications in Britain.
The Home Office is understood to be examining more than 100 applications potentially connected to the organisation. The cases involve people seeking protection under the European Convention on Human Rights from alleged persecution because of their sexuality in their home country.
The inquiry came to light after two men described as suspected ringleaders were arrested during dawn raids by Immigration Enforcement officers, who arrived wearing riot helmets and stab-resistant vests and carrying equipment to force entry.
Apanjon was established in 2017 and provides welfare services as well as organising regular social and cultural events for the Bangladeshi LGBT community
The operation took place at a dilapidated Whitechapel residential block. Two men were later brought out of separate flats in handcuffs and driven away in a four-wheel-drive vehicle, in a scene more commonly associated with counter-terrorism or organised-crime investigations.
‘It was madness,’ one resident said, recalling how around a dozen officers entered the graffiti-covered building on Tuesday morning.
The resident said officers could be heard shouting, ‘Open the door now’, as children prepared to leave for school. Few neighbours understood what was happening. The Home Office had reportedly been investigating asylum claims raising concerns about Apanjon, which it described as a ‘Bangladeshi LGBT welfare organisation based in Whitechapel’, for several months.
It is alleged that some applicants were supplied with ‘evidence packages’ costing thousands of pounds. These reportedly contained forged paperwork, supporting letters and staged photographs, with a number of images said to have been taken at the same gay bars and clubs.
According to the Home Office, some Bangladeshi men first sought asylum on political grounds and later claimed to be gay after those applications were rejected.
The arrests do not establish that either the two men or Apanjon committed an offence. Both remain the subject of an ongoing investigation.
Even so, the high-profile raids are likely to reinforce claims that some people fabricate evidence about their sexual orientation in order to secure permission to remain in the UK.
‘It’s a massive problem. A lot of people are doing it,’ Ejel Khan, founder of the Muslim LGBT Network, told the Daily Mail.
Khan said he had encountered people who appeared to be seeking entry to Britain by making such claims.
More migrants, often aided by Left-wing lawyers, are faking their sexuality to win the right to stay (file photo)
He said people had previously offered him money to write recommendation letters, despite admitting to him that they were not gay. He said he refused to provide them.
‘I would not entertain them. I help and advocate for asylum seekers who are genuinely gay and fleeing persecution. It’s been my life’s work. The bogus claimants tarnish the work we do.’
Figures show 2,133 asylum seekers claiming to be gay were allowed to stay in Britain in 2023 – the most recent year for which data is available where sexual orientation formed part of the basis for the application – up from 762 in 2022 and 677 in 2021. It’s four times the pre-Covid number.
Three years ago, Pakistan accounted for the highest number of cases citing sexual orientation (578), followed by Bangladesh (175), where homosexual activity can result in life imprisonment, then Nigeria (103) and India (39).
One of the reasons for the spike can be attributed to the backlog of applications which built up during the pandemic.
This is certainly not the whole story, however. Surely it cannot be a coincidence that the rise has corresponded with the proliferation of ‘Lefty Lawyers’ (former home secretary Dame Priti Patel’s description) along with a plethora of refugee groups and charities, some of whom are prepared to help migrants game the system, in any number of ways, for political reasons or simply for money.
It is a crowded field already occupied by criminal gangs.
There is also a more historic and systemic reason.
Statistics on sexual orientation were not recorded in a reportable format prior to 2015. By then, the Supreme Court had ended the Home Office’s policy of refusing asylum to gay refugees on the grounds they could avoid persecution abroad by pretending to be heterosexual.
Explaining the decision, Lord Rodger, one of the judges, said in extraordinary comments: ‘Just as male heterosexuals are free to enjoy themselves playing rugby, drinking beer and talking about girls with their mates, so male homosexuals are to be free to enjoy themselves going to Kylie concerts, drinking exotically coloured cocktails and talking about boys with their straight female mates.’
Theresa May, home secretary at the time, welcomed the ruling and introduced guidance for assessing claims based on sexuality.
A group of migrants wade through the water to board an inflatable dinghy before leaving the coast of northern France on September 6 (file photo)
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The upshot, without going into the legal minutiae, meant a fairer and more humane policy if claimants were telling the truth.
But it also offered a process which was easier to circumvent if they weren’t.
So, depending on your point of view, there are two ways of looking at the Home Office protocols on how caseworkers should consider such asylum claims.
It runs to more than 40 pages and the tone is perhaps epitomised by this paragraph: ‘The term ‘homosexual’ may be offensive to some. The term ‘gay’ is one which is more globally used and recognised as being more neutral as a descriptor. In all instances, caseworkers should establish the terminology preferred by the claimant.’
Critics might wonder how any bogus applicants are exposed at all, given what they would describe as the intrinsic political correctness in the guidelines.
Yet there have been some glaring examples.
Immigration judges, the Home Office said, have previously found claims supported by Apanjon to be ‘unreliable, inconsistent and staged, in the case of the photos’. The group was cited in an immigration ruling in August involving a Bangladeshi man who claimed he would be at risk if he was returned home.
The claimant, identified only as MHK, said he was a familiar face at the Whitechapel-based group and had a boyfriend – an account backed up by a witness.
Explicit photographs were also produced to prove he was gay.
But the judge ruled the evidence was ‘contrived’ and the pictures, in particular, were fake – a decision upheld at appeal, which meant he lost his right to remain in the country. It is not known if this is one of the cases now under scrutiny by the Home Office.
There have been other cases with no connection to Apanjon. Last year, Albanian asylum seeker Esmir Demaj suffered a similar fate to ‘MHK’ after petitioning for the right to stay in Britain because he was a ‘gay’ man, but failed to reveal he was married to a woman. He was found to have deliberately ‘misled’ the Home Office. A more egregious culprit was Saheed Azeez, who was granted asylum in 2023 after claiming he might be killed for being gay in his native Nigeria.
The same Azeez went on to have three children with three women and run a £220,000 parcel fraud, which later resulted in a jail sentence of more than five years. Not that Apanjon is the only welfare group to make headlines recently. In April, an adviser for Worcester LGBT, a Midlands organisation which describes itself as a support group for gay and lesbian asylum seekers, was secretly filmed promising an undercover BBC reporter that she would help him prepare and memorise a false story for a Home Office interview.
‘There are a lot of organisations here where there are people like you who are not gay but are applying for the visa,’ she told him. ‘You are not alone.’
She admitted perpetrating the fraud for the past 17 years, which included providing fake photographs, letters claiming sexual relationships and a Worcester LGBT endorsement, all for £2,500.
The founder and chairman of the organisation strongly denied any wrongdoing and said there had been a ‘misunderstanding’.
Nevertheless, the ‘adviser’ had been ‘permanently removed from all association with Worcester LGBT’.
Shortly afterwards, the organisation announced it had closed. A message on Worcester LGBT website read: ‘We thank all members and supporters for their trust in us over the years… the decision was taken because the harm caused by the BBC’s reporting made it impossible for the organisation to continue operating.’
There is just one further thing to add about the group.
At a Worcester LGBT event more than 150 miles away in Beckton, east London, attended by 175 men, several present told undercover reporters working for the same BBC programme that hardly anyone at the gathering was gay, including one who said: ‘Nobody is gay here. Not even 0.01 per cent are gay.’
Clearly, there were a lot of ‘misunderstandings’ before Worcester LGBT shut down.
Back in Whitechapel High Street, the Apanjon office remained empty this week following the raids. The group also had a second address located in a private, gated alleyway off the main thoroughfare further along the road, consisting of a first-floor room with just enough space for a table, chairs and two cabinets.
The landlord said they ‘moved in’ on August 28, paid four weeks’ rent, but failed to pay him for the following month, between September and October, and had now vanished. When he rang Apanjon, he did not receive a reply.
‘I never saw anyone from the group,’ he said. ‘I never saw any clients or any migrants. They still owe me £350. I will legally pursue them for that.’
The investigation into Apanjon was welcomed by LGBT rights campaigner Peter Tatchell.
‘Last year, we spoke out after being overwhelmed by a surge in asylum seekers who we believed to be fake,’ he said in a statement issued by his charity, the Peter Tatchell Foundation.
‘Safeguarding the integrity of the asylum system is essential to maintaining public trust and, most importantly, to ensuring that real victims of homophobic persecution are not overlooked or refused a safe haven.’
Anyone found guilty over the Apanjon controversy would be removed from the country, the Home Office said.
‘The fact there is now a spotlight on this is good but this is really only the tip of the iceberg,’ said Robert Bates, of the Centre for Migration Control. ‘I don’t know what the Home Office can do to change the processes to stop this happening. All the anecdotal evidence suggests this is something rampant throughout the asylum system.’
Is there anyone, apart from the usual suspects, who believes otherwise?
Additional reporting: Isaac Crowson and Mark Branagan