Journalist asylum-seeker attempts suicide hours before planned deportation
Source: Guardian
Journalist asylum-seeker attempts suicide hours before planned deportation
Home Office delays flight to Cameroon but is not backing down on decision. Protesters plan new appeal on medical ground as Marishka Van Steenbergen reports
Posted by
Marishka Van Steenbergen
Tuesday 17 July 2012 02.00 EDT guardian.co.uk
Sheffield asylum-seeker Bernard Mboueyeu is receiving medical treatment after drinking cleaning fluid just hours before he was due to be deported to Cameroon, where he fears persecution and jail.
The removal flight, reported in the Guardian Northerner yesterday, has now been cancelled and Mboueyeu remains at Campsfield House immigration centre where he is now on 24-hour suicide watch. Supporters say this is the second time that he has tried to take his own life.
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Mboueyeu fled his homeland of Cameroon, in 2007 after he was allegedly beaten up and tortured by the ruling regime for supporting opposition groups. The treatment followed his arrest by President Paul Biya's security forces for taking photographs of students being attacked during protests in 2006. Supporters say that the journalist, who was working for a newspaper in southern Cameroon at the time, was stripped naked, beaten up and kept in jail for forty days.
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Mboueyeu married charity worker Sharon in 2010 but the Home Office is insisting that he returns to Cameroon to apply for a spouse's visa. His supporters say that if he is returned, he could be arrested, face torture, or be locked up indefinitely.
Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/the-northerner/2012/jul/17/asylum-seeker-sheffield-cameroon
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