Career
Following the 1990 split of the political group into separate MQM-A and MQM-H factions, Siddiqui sided with the MQM-A subgroup. Three years later, during the Pakistan general election, he was kidnapped by the rival faction and held for five days as a prisoner. When the MQM-H faction began extorting 3000R monthly from Siddiqui, and later sought to increase the amount, he fled to Canada in 1994.
Five years later, after marrying a Canadian woman, he was initially granted refugee status.
However, when he applied for an exemption to immigrant visas, the Immigration and Refugee Board took note of his past membership in MQM and suggested it had terrorist connections. In January 2007, Federal Court judge Michael L. Phelan ruled that it was patently unreasonable for the Institutional Review Board to have suggested that the MQM was a terrorist organisation in Siddiqui"s case, when they had offered the opposite opinion in the earlier case.