Asylum seeker family facing deportation

A FAMILY of asylum seekers face being sent back to Cameroon, where they fear they may be killed, after immigration officials raided their home for a second time.

Fred Nukagem, Sandra Yonga Mbell and their three children were taken from their Middleport home on Wednesday when immigration officers arrested them at 6.30am.

They are being held at a detention centre in Bedfordshire and have been booked on a flight to Cameroon on Monday.

The family was first arrested last month after an asylum claim was refused.

But lawyers won a reprieve hours before they were due to be flown out of the country.

They argued the family could not leave immediately because the children – two-year-old twins Grace and Josepha and five-month-old Stoke-on-Trent-born Julie Sandra – had not had anti-malarial drugs.

The family was preparing to launch a Home Office appeal to try to avoid deportation when they were arrested again this week.

Mr Nukagem, who came to the UK as a student in 2003, says he has been tortured in Cameroon and faces execution because of his links to opponents of the country's Government.

The 37-year-old said: "Immigration officers let themselves into my home when we were in bed, I was held down with my arms pinned behind my back, naked in front of four officers.

"We were put in a cage in the back of a police car and taken away.

"I have said I will refuse to get on any flight, I can't go back because I know I will be executed, though I have said I will happily go to any other country in the world.

"I was shocked to be arrested again because the children have still not had anti-malarial drugs and my lawyers made it clear we were going to appeal. The problem is getting the documents together takes time.

"The whole thing is a nightmare and I feel we are being victimised. Being kept in the detention centre is horrible."

Mr Nukagem hopes his lawyers can organise his appeal papers by Monday, to halt the family's deportation.

Mrs Mbell, who was imprisoned in Cameroon before coming to Britain illegally in 2006, said: "It's very stressful, we know we will be murdered if we go back there."

A UK Border Agency spokesman said: "We only seek to remove families who are in the UK unlawfully after independent courts have agreed they have no further right to remain in the UK.

"We would much rather that failed asylum seekers accepted that fact and left voluntarily. Sadly, some families choose not to do so even though they are given every opportunity to leave voluntarily. We have a duty to enforce the law."