[size=18pt]Isa Muazu 'in UK after flight turned back from Nigeria'[/size]




A Nigerian man said to be "near death" following a hunger strike is back in the UK after the Home Office flight deporting him had to turn around.

Lawyers for Isa Muazu, who has refused food for "over 100 days", said he was back at Harmondsworth detention centre.

It is thought the Nigerian authorities did not clear the plane to land.

Mr Muazu sought asylum in the UK saying he would be killed by Islamic extremists back in Nigeria. Labour said the government had questions to answer.

The Home Office rejects his arguments and attempted to deport the 45-year-old on Friday after he lost a series of legal challenges.

The privately-chartered jet carrying Mr Muazu was in the air for a number of hours, but it is believed the Nigerian authorities did not give the pilot landing rights. It is unclear why.

The plane is thought to have stopped in Malta for two hours before returning to the UK.

His lawyers say he has returned to the medical wing at Harmondsworth.

The Home Office refused to comment on the latest developments, but it is understood officials are working with the Nigerian government to try to secure Mr Muazu's removal.

Hunger strike

He has been held in detention since he claimed asylum in July, saying he faced persecution from the hardline Islamic group Boko Haram.

Mr Muazu entered the country on a visitor's visa in July 2007 and stayed without permission after it expired in January 2008.

It is believed he then found work in south-east London and was detained on the day he claimed asylum, 25 July this year.

Duncan Lewis Solicitors, representing Mr Muazu, said his case was then fast-tracked and his application was rejected in August.

They said he had made himself "seriously ill" in his protest, adding: "His hunger strike lasted for over 100 days".

A claim that his detention was unlawful was rejected by the Court of Appeal on 25 November, and two further last-minute appeals were also refused, his lawyers said.

Shadow immigration minister David Hanson said Home Secretary Theresa May needed to "explain how this case has been handled".

"How could the Home Office put a man in this medical condition on a long flight at taxpayers' expense with no agreement from anyone that the plane could actually land?

"Deportations should be carried out with competence and humanity - neither of those things seem to have happened in this case."

And Lord Roberts, a Lib Dem peer, told the Observer newspaper he had seen Mr Muazu on Tuesday "when a doctor had judged him too ill to fly".

"Goodness knows what state he must be in now, the poor man," the peer said. "He needs hospital treatment.

"[Home Secretary Theresa May] has caused immense harm to one individual and spent an extraordinary amount of taxpayers' money.

"I hope there will be no question of sending this poor man away again."

The paper says when the plane landed he was "was taken off by stretcher".

The Nigerian is 5ft 11in (1.8m) tall, weighs eight stone (53kg) and has described himself as "looking like a skeleton", his lawyers have said.

He has said that he came to the UK "for a better life" and would "rather die" than face removal.

SOURCE: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-25173797

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The Case of Isa Muazu: A Study in Barbarism

BY MATT CARR.

In terms of people who matter in the eyes of this government, Isa Muazu ticks very few boxes. He is Nigerian. He is an 'illegal immigrant', a 'visa overstayer', and a 'failed' asylum seeker - a category which is generally considered by the public to be synonymous with 'liar'.

He is also poor, not one of the rich Chinese who Cameron is falling over himself to bring here, and has now 'turned a page' in Britain's relations with the Dalai Lamai and Tibet to make sure they come.

From the point of view of the Home Office however, Muazu does have some symbolic value. Because all the negatives listed above make it possible to remove him from the UK without anyone even blinking an eye about it. And by doing that Theresa May and the government can add him to the statistics of removed 'illegal immigrants' at the end of the year, and tell the public that they have been 'listening to their concerns' and have kept their promise to transform the UK into an 'inhospitable environment' for migrants.

A noble aspiration, and we already know the lengths our Home Secretary will go to in order to realize it. In January this year the Home Office deported a Ugandan lesbian Jackie Nanyonjo back to Uganda, who had come to the UK five years after being beaten by her husband.

To say that Uganda is not a hospitable country for gays would be understating it somewhat, but Nanyonjo's application for asylum was rejected. During her flight back she was reportedly beaten and strangled by her UKBA-contracted Reliance security escorts.

Shortly after her return to Uganda, Nanyonjo died, allegedly because of injuries she received at the hands of her escorts.

Muazu is an even more twisted variant on this tradition. These are the salient facts: Muazu came to the UK in 2007 on a visitor's visa. He stayed on after it ran out in 2008. On 25 July this year he was detained. He then applied for asylum, claiming that he was likely to be killed by the murderous Islamist group Boko Haram, which he says has already killed members of his family.

His application was fast-tracked and in August it was rejected, as fast-tracked cases often are. He was then detained at Harmondsworth removal centre in preparation for deportation.

Muazu went on hunger strike in protest at the way his asylum claim had been treated and against his detention. The Home Office refused to release him into the community. Instead they prepared an 'end of life plan' for him: a novel procedure that can be essentially translated into a very simple message: you are are an illegal immigrant and if you want to starve yourself to death that is perfectly ok, because we are going to deport him.

On Friday Muazu was deported. By that time he had gone more than 100 days without food, and weighed only 53 kilos, even though he is nearly six feet tall. He was so ill, according to the Liberal peer Lord Roberts, who has campaigned against the deportation, that his doctor said that he was not fit to fly.

That did not stop the Home Office. Initially the plan was to fly him out on a regular Virgin Atlantic plane, but that was cancelled, presumably because Virgin didn't want a man who could not stand or see and might die in flight upsetting the passengers.

Undeterred, our valiant guardians of the border rented a private jet at an estimated cost of £180,000, and on Friday they flew him to Nigeria, with Home Office officials accompanying him ( How their mothers must be proud of them, I know I am).

On approaching Abuja airport however, the border warriors were thwarted once again, when the Nigerian authorities refused to let the plane land, for reasons that have not been made clear.

Instead the plane was forced to return to the UK, via Malta. And now he is back in Harmondsworth and the Home Office has no comment.

Labour does however. After months of silence, the shadow immigration minister has finally roused himself to question the competence and humanity of the deportation, while emphasizing its cost to the taxpayer rather than the morality of this disgusting episode, or the policies that make such things possible.

Labour does not exactly occupy the moral high ground on this issue. It was under a Labour government in 2008, that the Ghanian 'overstayer' Ama Sumami was deported, even though she had cancer of the bone marrow and was kept alive through treatment that was not available in her own country.

Campaigners against her deportation predicted that she would die if she was returned, and they were right. She was dead just over two months after arriving back in Ghana.

Even with these precedents, the case of Isa Muazu represents a new threshold in the increasingly depraved attempts by the British state to 'defend our borders.' The last time the British government let people die on hunger strike was in 1981 in Northern Ireland.

Then, it was the Thatcher government refusing to allow Irish 'terrorists' to have political recognition. This time the Home Office is so determined to exclude an 'illegal immigrant' who says that he came to the UK for a 'better life' that it is willing to let him starve himself to death to stop others from following his example.

Muazu is reportedly eating again, which may mean that he may live, in which case he will probably be deported again. If he dies, he will have proved the 'sincerity' of his asylum claim and he may be allowed to stay here - in a cemetery.

Because like the drowned migrants in Lampedusa last month who were given posthumous Italian citizenship - something that wasn't granted to the survivors - governments don't have a problem with dead 'illegal immigrants' who cross their borders; it's the living ones they don't want.

I gather that Theresa May is an Anglican and a regular churchgoer. One hopes she bonded with her God yesterday. But no matter how many prayers she offered up, they will not wipe away her responsibility for this shameful and disgusting act.

And a country that allows people like her get away with things like this is pretty disgusting too, and we really ought to take a good look at ourselves, and look where it is being taken, and ask ourselves exactly how far we are willing to go to 'protect' our borders.

SOURCE: http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/matt-carr/isa-muazu-deportation-theresa-may_b_4369125.html