Lee Hsien Yang accused his brother, a former prime minister, of persecuting him politically, inflaming the feud in Singapore’s first family.
Lee Hsien Yang, a member of the family that led Singapore for decades after its independence from British rule, said on Tuesday that he had been granted political asylum in Britain and accused his nation of persecuting him throughout his brother’s tenure as prime minister.
Mr. Lee said in a statement posted on Facebook that the United Kingdom had determined that he faced the risk of political persecution and could not safely return to Singapore, granting the asylum protection he applied for in June 2022.
“I never imagined in my worst nightmares that I would end up becoming a refugee from a country that my father built,” he said in a phone interview from London, where he and his wife have lived for two years. “But that’s the circumstance that I find myself in.”
Mr. Lee is the youngest child of Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s first prime minister, who declared the country’s independence from British colonial rule in 1963. Mr. Lee’s older brother, Lee Hsien Loong, was Singapore’s prime minister for 20 years in a term that ended earlier this year, and he remains as a senior minister and secretary-general of the ruling People’s Action Party.
Britain approved Mr. Lee’s asylum claim in August, accepting that he had a “well-founded fear of persecution” and permitting him to remain there for five years, according to a letter from Britain’s Home Office provided by Mr. Lee. He can apply to extend his stay at the end of that period, it said.
Andrea Goh, a spokeswoman for the Singaporean government, denied that Mr. Lee and his family were victims of a “baseless” and “unfounded” campaign of persecution, writing in a statement to The Guardian that the government published on its website: “They are and have always been free to return to Singapore.” The statement was issued in response to an interview with Mr. Lee published in The Guardian on Tuesday.
