Former subpostmistress: My children and I fled home ‘in the night like refugees’
Shazia Saddiq, 40, left her home in Newcastle after she and her two children were ‘assaulted with eggs and flour’ by members of the community.
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Your support makes all the difference.A former subpostmistress has told of fleeing her home with her children “in the night like refugees” after members of the community who thought her a thief lobbed eggs and flour at them.
Shazia Saddiq, 40, fell victim to the Horizon IT issues which led to hundreds of Post Office branch managers being convicted of swindling money on the basis of evidence from the flawed accounting system.
She attended the Post Office public inquiry at Aldwych House, central London, on Thursday where Post Office investigator Stephen Bradshaw, who was involved in the probe into her circumstances, was giving evidence.
In the night like refugees my children and I left. They got their teddies, that’s what they took with them
Mr Bradshaw also investigated subpostmistress Janet Skinner, 53, who has also spoken of being shunned by her community in the wake of accusations of wrongdoing.
Mrs Saddiq had three post office branches in Newcastle between 2009 and 2016, when she was terminated.
One of the branches suffered a cyber attack in 2014 after which over £30,000 seemingly went missing.
It was later found in a suspense account but she told the PA news agency: “They held me responsible.”
When the branch was shut down, she and her two children had foodstuffs thrown at them as they tried to enter their home directly above the premises.
“We had been assaulted with eggs and flour in Newcastle because they thought I was a thief,” she told PA.
She said: “In the night like refugees my children and I left. They got their teddies, that’s what they took with them.”
She moved in with her now husband in Banbury, Oxfordshire – where they currently both work as pest controllers – but she said investigations against her continued which she described as “tormenting”.
Mrs Saddiq was never convicted. She refused to sign accounts off that would have meant she agreed with figures from the faulty Horizon IT system.
Ms Skinner, however, was sentenced to nine months in prison in 2007 for false accounting.
She was 35 at the time and had to leave her two children behind.
Also in attendance at the inquiry on Thursday, Ms Skinner told PA that going to prison was the hardest part of what she had been through.
I feel more empowered now than I have ever done because I’m fighting for what’s right
“Leaving my kids behind,” she said. “Not seeing them for the time I was in prison. Losing everything that we had – a whole family home.”
She said she spent 15 years of her life, between being released from prison and having her conviction quashed, worried that people would recognise her on the street.
But she described the recognition of her innocence in 2021 as a “massive turning point”.
“I feel more empowered now than I have ever done because I’m fighting for what’s right,” Ms Skinner continued.
“If this is helping people come forward who have been hiding away and shunned by their communities, disgraced, in the same way we were.”
She is hoping for accountability and highlighted public pressure as key to justice being done.
“The drama is the tip of the iceberg,” she told PA. “The story is so much bigger.
“The Government have been aware of this ongoing fight that we have had for years and years.
“It’s because the public are so behind each and every one of us that they have decided to step up.”