Terror of Flight 101: An echo of Orwell.
The flight leaves Heathrow airport’s Terminal Four, every Wednesday bearing the number KQ101. The echo of George Orwell’s Room 101 is unhappily appropriate. On this Kenya Airways jet, many asylum-seekers’ worst nightmares do come true. KQ101 is the deportation flight chartered by the British Government to return refugees to Africa. According to human rights groups, this flight carries out the most Africa-bound removals of unsuccessful asylum applicants to the UK. It has also become a flight that has attracted allegations of abuse by guards. From Nairobi the detainees are flown all over Africa where they are handed over to security and immigration authorities.

An investigation by The Independent concludes that many of the deportees suffer assault and racial abuse at the hands of the guards who accompany them.

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Filed under politics, quotations
Related Tags: africa, asylum-seekers, deportees, environment, human rights, orwell, racial abuse, refugees, security, travel
This was posted on Tuesday, October 9th, 2007 at 9:05 am. You can follow any responses through the comments feed.

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