Why did guards let mob stop rapist’s deportation?
MP’s anger at security on jet who gave in to ‘mutiny’ by passengers
PRIVATE security guards who halted the deportation of a gang rapist after being heckled by a group of plane passengers came under fire yesterday.
Somalian Yaqub Ahmed, 29, escaped being thrown out of the country after fellow passengers started chanting at the guards escorting him.
They then cheered and applauded as the guards – fearing a violent confrontation – took him off the plane bound for Turkey. But the passengers were unaware that Ahmed had just completed a nine-year sentence for a vicious sex attack on a 16-year-old girl.
Tory backbencher Philip Hollobone, who has campaigned to speed up the deportation process, said: ‘We need to deport these people and members of the public should not be allowed to obstruct the proper course of justice.
‘Officials accompanying the deportee need to react appropriately to passengers who do not know what is going on.
‘To simply walk off in the face of passenger confusion is not good enough.’
Harry Fletcher, of the Victims’ Rights Campaign, added: ‘This deportation was clearly in the public interest.
‘Sitting deportees in the general passenger area of a plane is wrong and leads to this kind of ill-informed protest.’
The astonishing confrontation was caught on a mobile phone by a passenger on the Turkish Airlines flight TK1986 last Tuesday. About a dozen holidaymakers angrily intervened shortly before the plane left London Heathrow bound for Istanbul.
One traveller complained ‘they’re separating him from his family’ as others chanted ‘take him off the plane’. When the security guards caved in and walked Ahmed off the flight, he began thanking everyone on board for their support.
Ahmed is now in an immigration detention centre while officials try to place him on another flight out of the UK. It was
‘To simply walk off is not good enough’
unclear last night how long it would take to rearrange the deportation, although it is understood that a flight could be arranged within days.
The Mail on Sunday revealed Ahmed and three other youths preyed on their victim after she became separated from friends during a night out in London’s Leicester Square in August 2007. They lured her back to a flat in Crouch End, North London, by pretending her friends were waiting for her there, then gang-raped her. The attackers, aged between 18 and 20, were caught on the scene when neighbours heard the girl’s cries for help and dialled 999.
Despite denying rape, they were all found guilty at Wood Green Crown Court and jailed for nine years each.
The youngest gang member, Ondogo Ahmed, travelled to Syria to fight for Islamic State after being freed. He was killed a few weeks later.
It is not the first time the deportation of foreign criminals at the end of their sentence on public flights has led to an angry reaction. As a result, the Government spent millions chartering planes to fly criminals and failed asylum seekers to their home countries. But the mounting cost, reaching £8.6million on charter trips alone in one year, has led officials to increasingly use commercial flights.
A Home Office spokesman said: ‘Foreign nationals who abuse our hospitality by committing crimes in the UK should be in no doubt of our determination to deport them, and we have removed more than 43,000 foreign offenders since 2010.
‘We will accept nothing but the highest standards from contractors employed to manage enforced returns.’