Now Iraqi child sex offender can stay in Scotland
AN Iraqi child sex offender ordered to leave Scotland eight years ago over his ‘ abhorrent’ crimes has won the right to stay in the country. Howri Hamad Garib managed to remain in the UK by launching taxpayer-funded appeals – and due to the failure of the authorities to send him home.
Appeal judges told Home Secretary Theresa May in March the original decision to deport him was wrong.
The Home Office has decided it will have to let Garib stay – because technically his crimes were not serious enough to merit kicking him out.
The decision is the latest in a series of scandals over the Government’s apparent inability to deport dangerous offenders.
Last month Jonathan Isaby, chief executive of the TaxPay- ers’ Alliance, said the case was bad for Garib’s victims and for taxpayers, adding: ‘ Deportation cases like this must be conducted as efficiently and as quickly as possible.’
Garib indecently assaulted three 14-year- old girls at a swimming pool in 2004, a month after he arrived in Scotland.
In 2008 he was served with a deportation order by the then Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, who said sexual offences against children are ‘ particularly abhorrent’.
But f ollowing a string of appeals the 41-year-old will be allowed to stay.
A Government source said: ‘Reluctantly we had no option but to allow him to remain after the case was returned to us by the Scottish judges.’
If the offence had led to a jail sentence, then the case to get rid of Garib would have been simpler, meaning some child sex crimes are no longer seen as serious enough to warrant throwing out the offender.
Garib’s trial for the indecent assaults was heard at Airdrie Sheriff Court in March 2006, two months before his visa was due for review.
During the trial, before Sheriff Morag Galbraith, the girls said they were ‘terrified and distressed’.
Garib, of Springburn, Glasgow, was put on the sex offenders register and banned from visiting swimming pools, until being admonished and dismissed in June 2007.
In September 2008, he was served with a deportation order, which his lawyers argued had not been decided fairly.
Their claims were rejected in a judgment from Lord Boyd of Duncansby at the Court of Session in March 2014.
Garib l aunched another appeal. In March last year, judges Lady Paton, Lord Menzies and Lady Clark of Calton told the Home Secretary to reconsider his application, ruling in the Court of Session that procedures had not been followed correctly. The Home Office then decided Garib could not be deported.
In another case that emerged in November last year, a convicted killer from Albania, Fatjon Kapri, was deported after losing a four-year, taxpayerfunded legal fight.
The killer’s case, which used legal aid funding, may have cost taxpayers up to £100,000.
The Home Office did not wish to comment on Garib.
‘We had to allow him to remain’