The Dwelling Workplace threatened to forcibly take away a person from the UK who’s prone to be a key witness within the inquest of the asylum seeker who died on the Bibby Stockholm barge.
Leonard Farruku, 26, an asylum seeker from Albania, was discovered lifeless on the Bibby Stockholm in Portland, Dorset, utilized by the Dwelling Workplace to accommodate tons of of asylum seekers, on 12 December final yr. An inquest is scheduled to open into his dying in September 2025.
Yusuf Deen Kargbo, 20, a boxer who competed within the 2022 Commonwealth Video games in Birmingham earlier than claiming asylum, was Farruku’s roommate on the barge and nearly actually the final individual to have seen him alive.
It was Kargbo who raised the alarm when he awoke early on the morning of 12 September, discovered Farruku was not in his mattress within the bunk they shared and that the door of the bathroomwas locked with no response when Kargbo repeatedly knocked on the door. Police pressured open the lavatory door and found Farruku’s physique.
After Farruku’s dying, Kargbo was moved to Dwelling Workplace lodging in Wales however mentioned he was woken up there at 6am two and a half weeks in the past, arrested and brought to Harmondsworth immigration elimination centre, close to Heathrow, as a result of the Dwelling Workplace had rejected his asylum declare.
Talking to the Guardian on Friday from the detention centre, Kargbo mentioned: “I was called by people in the office at the detention centre yesterday and told to pack my bags because my plane had arrived to return me to Sierra Leone. I told them I was not going and wanted to continue with my asylum claim. They did not force me to go but I don’t know what’s happening now.
“Everything is not fine. I’m so stressed that I can’t eat or sleep. I’m thinking a lot about what happened to me in my country and what happened to Leonard. I had never been through anything like that before.
“In my asylum accommodation I was going to a boxing gym to keep up with my training, but I can’t do that in detention. I’m feeling sick all the time in this place.”
In 2021, a courtroom dominated that the Dwelling Workplace had an obligation to guard proof for inquests in immigration detention and mustn’t try and deport witnesses to those deaths earlier than proof related to an inquest was secured from them.
It was additionally discovered that the Dwelling Workplace had unlawfully tried to deport a key witness to the dying of Oscar Okwurime, who died in Harmondsworth in 2019.
Whereas the Bibby Stockholm barge will not be an immigration detention centre, Farruku’s household have argued that the barge was a type of quasi-detention for him.
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Attorneys for Farruku’s household intervened within the deliberate deportation of Kargbo on Thursday, reminding the federal government that Kargbo had vital proof about his dying. If Kargbo had been forcibly returned to Sierra Leone on Thursday he wouldn’t have been in a position to attend the inquest.
Kargbo stays fearful that the Dwelling Workplace could strive once more to take away him.
“I do not know what is going to happen to me. I’m very scared,” he mentioned
The Dwelling Workplace declined to touch upon the case.
