Up to 60 Tamil asylum seekers are set to be forced to return back to Sri Lanka by UK authorities on Wednesday, despite evidence from human rights groups that even Tamils who have returned to the island voluntarily, have faced torture.
Channel 4 spoke to one asylum seeker due to be deported on Wednesday, who had already cut his neck in an attempted suicide last week. He said,
“Definitely, the government, they’ll harass and detain me. I won’t go tomorrow. I want to die here, in this place better. I want to die.”
“The government, they will kill me. Definitely”
Another Tamil asylum seeker showed the news channel scars on his back from torture he received after being deported to Sri Lanka from the UK. He managed to escape from the island again to tell Channel 4,
“The army officers and the CID came to my house one day and I was taken away.
They took me to detention where I was tortured in various ways. It was a horrible experience which I don’t want to remember. I was burned with cigarettes, I was beaten up with several objects and I sustained all theses scars on my body.”
See the report from Channel 4 below.
Earlier this week Human Rights Watch called for a halt in deportations to Sri Lanka stating,
“the British government is turning a blind eye to compelling evidence that Tamils deported to Sri Lanka risk torture on arrival.”
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