‘What do you want us to do with the body?’
Revealed: The troubled man who endured 4 years in immigration detention, and whose death in custody remains a mystery
This is the dead man whose name officials didn’t want you to know. Abdurahman Ibrahim Hassan was a loving son who doted on his mother in Toronto and adored his little niece. He was 39, the youngest of eight children, the baby of a family who had fled war-torn Somalia.
He was also a man who struggled for decades with mental illness and diabetes, was in and out of trouble with the law and spent the last four years of his life in immigration detention awaiting deportation.
But the circumstances of his death — and even his name — have been shrouded in secrecy.
The Special Investigations Unit, which is probing his death, would only reveal his age, but not his identity or the details surrounding his death, other than that he was hospitalized for medical reasons, became agitated and had to be restrained.
The Canada Border Services Agency, whose custody he was in, issued a brief news release noting “an adult male detainee who was receiving care, passed away in hospital.” No name, age, nationality or details of his detention were mentioned.
“In this instance, the name of a detainee who has died in custody is considered personal information, and CBSA will not make this information publicly available,” Goran Vragovic, CBSA regional director general for the Greater Toronto Area, said in a letter to the Star.
Meanwhile, Hassan’s family is desperate for answers.
They say they have been told nothing, apart from a 1:40 a.m. phone call on June11from Peterborough Regional Health Centre telling them Hassan was dead and asking them “What do you want us to do with the body?”
A week after Hassan’s death, Deina Ibrahim, the family’s spokesperson, said neither CBSA nor the Central East Correctional Centre, in Lindsay — both responsible for holding the man for four years — have contacted them.
The only authority that has reached out to the family, Ibrahim says, is the SIU, an independent agency that investigates civilian deaths, injuries or sexual assault involving police. All they were told, she said, was that Hassan’s death is under investigation.
“No one has given us any information about what happened to Abdurahman, why he was in the hospital, who took him there, when they took him there and what caused his death,” she told the Star.
“He had a family that loved him and cared about him dearly.”
Monica Hudon, spokesperson for the SIU, said the probe is ongoing and two officers involved are being investigated. Hudon also noted the SIU wasn’t releasing the dead detainee’s name at the request of his family.
“The SIU’s policy is to not release names of individuals unless they, or next of kin, have given permission. In this case, the mother of the deceased man has asked us to not release his name and we are respecting her wishes,” said Hudon.
In the letter to the Star, CBSA’s Vragovic said the agency “strives” to release as much information as possible, while respecting privacy legislation, matters under investigation and the wishes of family members in question.
“As a result of the detainee’s passing while hospitalized, there are multiple concurrent investigations underway by various agencies and the CBSA is fully cooperating with these investigations. The CBSA has not been informed of the cause of death,” wrote Vragovic.
“The CBSA takes this matter seriously and will complete a review of the circumstances surrounding death to identify any factors that could be addressed to prevent any future loss of life.”
Peterborough Regional Health Centre did not respond to email or phone messages left Thursday afternoon.
The Lindsay jail referred calls to the Ministry of Community Safety and Correctional Services, who did not respond Thursday afternoon.
On Thursday, University of Toronto law school researchers released a study that found Canada regularly breaches international human rights obligations by routinely detaining migrants with mental health issues in maximum-security jails — sometimes for years.
According to Hassan’s family, the findings of the hard-hitting report mirror what happened to Hassan, who came on his own to Canada for refuge from Mogadishu in 1993 as a teenager.
Ibrahim said Hassan was granted asylumin Canadain the mid-1990s but never became a permanent resident because of his mental illness. “He was moved from school to school. No one knew how to deal with him. He finally dropped out and we kept him at home,” she said. “Being bipolar, he had his good days and bad days. On a bad day, he got agitated and people would call police on him. He was just in and out of hospital a lot.”
According to court documents, in a 2012 application by former Immigration Minister Jason Kenney to quash an order for his release, Hassan had been convicted of violent criminal offences starting in 1999. A deportation order had been issued against him in 2005, the court documents show.
Following an assault conviction in 2012, the documents show, Hassan served a four-month jail sentence and was then transferred to immigration custody. He had been held in detention since then on the grounds he posed a danger to the public, and would unlikely appear for removal from Canada.
Federal Court Justice James Russell ruled in favour of the government, saying “the respondent was a very dangerous man who had not internalized past therapies and whose actions over time were more persuasive than his words.”
Ibrahim said Hassan’s mother last saw her son with two of his sisters on May16, during one of her regular visits to the Lindsay jail.
“CBSA wrote the last chapter of Abdurahman’s life,” said Ibrahim. “They handed him to the correctional facilities to edit it and closed the book.”
Meanwhile, about100 detainees who knew of Hassan in the Lindsay jail have planned to fast on Friday to mark one week since his death, according to advocacy group, End Immigration Detention Network. With files from Olivia Carville