£80k compo for violent repeat con held too long
A “PROLIFIC and violent” criminal guilty of 30 offences has won nearly £80,000 in compensation after being locked up for too long.
Somalian Abdulrahman Mohammed, 39, has been jailed more than a dozen times for crimes including affray, knife possession, multiple assaults and robberies since he arrived in 1996.
But a High Court judge has ruled the Home Office unlawfully detained him for 445 days as they tried to kick him out of the country. Mohammed had fled Somalia, aged 17, after enduring “unimaginable barbarity”. Aged 13, his uncle was shot dead and a girl was raped in front of him, before thugs sliced through his cheeks with bayonets in a bid to cut out his tongue. The court heard he was then “branded with a burning cattle prod” before his torturers told him: “Remember us by this.” He arrived in Britain and was given leave to remain but soon slipped into a life of crime. In 2008 the Home Secretary issued a deportation order but the European Court of Human Rights stepped in due to fears for his safety in Somalia.
Despite being unable to deport him, Mohammed, of Shepherd’s Bush, West London, was kept in an immigration detention centre for three periods between 2012 and 2016. Home Office lawyers later admitted this was unlawful.
Awarding him compensation, Judge Edward Pepperall said: “It is essential, where a person is unlawfully imprisoned by the state, that an independent judiciary should hold the executive to account.
“Justice should be done to all.”