An asylum seeker who was released from detention was subjected to an extraordinary nine-day, 407-mile detour by the Home Office costing at least £5,000 to the taxpayer before being returned to his accommodation 22 miles from the original detention centre.
His lawyers say that as a survivor of torture he should never have been detained in the first place and that the whole bizarre 48-day episode could have been avoided.
Mohamed Ahmed, a 34-year-old asylum seeker from Darfur in Sudan, says he was tortured by the Omar al-Bashir regime and that his extensive torture scars have been confirmed in an independent medical report.
His ordeal began on 15 February when he attended a Home Office reporting centre in London Bridge for a routine monthly reporting session. He was arrested and detained at Heathrow immigration removal centre because his removal from the UK was imminent. Yet the Home Office issued neither removal directions nor a plane ticket.
“The Home Office has detained me twice before and then released me and it was horrible being locked up again,” he said. “I was imprisoned by the Bashir regime and tortured and I felt very traumatised to be locked up again. I had lots of flashbacks about what happened to me when I was imprisoned and tortured in Sudan. While I was in detention at Heathrow I would wake up in the morning and for the first few minutes I would feel OK. Then I would remember that I wasn’t free but had been locked up again.”
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