Seven asylum seekers in Home Office housing died in suspected suicides over 4 months

27/06/2024

Last year was the worst on record for suspected suicides among asylum seekers placed in Home Office housing after a four-month spate in which seven migrants caught in a case backlog were recorded as having taken their lives, it can be revealed.

An investigation by i and Liberty Investigates has uncovered the rollcall of tragedies – described by the Refugee Council as “heartbreaking” – in an internal Home Office database. They include a 20-year-old gay woman who died after fleeing her native Oman over its repressive laws against homosexuality and a 29-year-old Somalian man who died by suspected suicide while in police custody after waiting almost two and a half years for his case to be dealt with.

In May, i revealed the case of Ismael Maolanzadeh, a 19-year-old Iranian Kurd who died by suicide in a Birmingham hotel room in December. His older brother Mustafa, who discovered his sibling’s body, said an absence of information about the fate of their asylum claims had tipped Ismael into a fatal depression.

The revelation of the spike in deaths comes shortly after Home Secretary James Cleverly suggested that asylum seekers being held at a controversial mass accommodation site were making false claims about feeling suicidal. Mr Cleverly said illegal migrants “lie to further their own causes” after being presented with research suggesting a “severe mental health crisis” among people housed at MDP Wethersfield, a former RAF base in Essex, with some 41 per cent of those surveyed saying they had experienced suicidal thoughts.

Mr Cleverly’s office declined to comment on the findings of the investigation by i and Liberty Investigates, but a Home Office spokesperson said the mental health needs of asylum seekers was taken “seriously”.

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Lawyers and human rights groups have repeatedly raised fears about the effects of long waits on the mental health of asylum applicants. Campaigners said they were “alarmed and saddened” by the flurry of deaths last year, adding that poor living conditions, safeguarding failures and delays were leading to “anguish” among claimants.

Britain does not record asylum or refugee status as part of the death registration process, nor does the government routinely collect data on suicides among the same groups – a situation which mental health campaigners have warned must change.

Imran Hussain, spokesperson for the Refugee Council, described the findings by i and Liberty Investigates as “very concerning”. He said: “The idea of someone fleeing war and persecution in their home country and enduring a terrifying journey to find safety in the UK, only to then take their life while in the asylum system, is heartbreaking.”

The seven deaths highlighted by the investigation all took place in a 15-week period between August and December last year, representing a rate of about one a fortnight. A further death earlier in 2023 brings the total number of suicides among asylum seekers in Home Office accommodation that year to eight – the highest annual figure since records were first disclosed in 2016.

The information about the seven cases – involving individuals aged from 19 to 63 – has only come to light following Freedom of Information requests by Liberty Investigates and subsequent use of sources to trace and identify deaths from the anonymised data.

The deaths, which were all marked as suspected suicides in a Home Office database created to track potentially high-profile incidents involving asylum claimants, involved individuals who all had outstanding applications to remain in the UK and had been waiting on average for 388 days for a decision on their cases. The longest wait had been 829 days and the shortest 120 days.

Four of the seven were living in hotels, with a fifth housed on the controversial Bibby Stockholm barge – and at least two had expressed anxiety or despair about not knowing when their claims would be decided. Hotels, which are being used to house asylum seekers at a cost of £8m a day, are intended to be used on a short-term basis before longer-term housing can be found, but claimants routinely spend many months in such temporary accommodation.

The backlog of asylum claims rose dramatically between 2018 and 2022 from 27,000 to 132,000 cases, before falling last year by 28 per cent to about 95,000 in December. Of those awaiting an initial decision in January, some 61 per cent had been waiting more than six months.

The cases catalogued in the Home Office database include the high-profile death of Leonard Farruku, 27, a talented Albanian musician whose body was found on the Bibby Stockholm last December, and that of Mr Maolanzadeh.

The 19-year-old had arrived in Britain by small boat from France last August and his details had been passed to the Home Office’s Third Country Unit (TCU), the team responsible for deciding whether a migrant should be barred from applying to stay in the UK under new “inadmissibility” rules which can automatically block claims.

Ismael’s TCU status meant he was at risk of inclusion in the new Rwanda scheme, although his case had been paused at the time of his death in December and he was not formally informed of his status because of the legal and political wrangling over the policy at the time. An inquest based solely on written documentation ruled in April that Ismael had died by suicide following an argument with his long-distance girlfriend in Iran – a conclusion now disputed by his brother, who did not get the opportunity to give evidence.

seven asylum seekers in home office housing died in suspected suicides over 4 months

Ismael Maolanzadeh arrived in Britain last August after fleeing his native Iran. He took his own life in December

The data obtained by the investigation also includes less known and previously unreported tragedies.

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Among them is the death of 20-year-old Rima al-Badi, a gay woman who had spent more than a year waiting for an initial decision after fleeing the Gulf state of Oman. She was found dead – reportedly in hotel accommodation in London – on 1 September last year.

A social media account which appears to be linked to Rima contained entries discussing her sexuality and atheism, saying that she feared recriminations and had no future in Oman, where homosexuality is banned and punishable by a maximum penalty of three years’ imprisonment.

A friend told Liberty Investigates and i that she had been depressed in the days before her death at the long wait to be interviewed. Nabhan al-Hanshi, a campaigner at the Omani Centre for Human Rights who met Rima, said: “She said, ‘why is it taking so long? Why are they not interviewing me?’. I told her this is the process in the UK.”

The data obtained by the investigation also disclosed two previously unknown suicide cases – an unnamed 20-year-old man from Iraq who died in September and a 29-year-old Somalian who died in police custody at an undisclosed location in the Midlands or East of England in October.

According to the Home Office records, the Somali man, who had been waiting 829 days for a decision on his claim, had previously been arrested several months earlier on suspicion of stabbing another asylum seeker and had been due to stand trial shortly before he died. It is not clear why the man was in police custody at the time of his death.

The seven deaths include that of Irakli Kapanadze, a 37-year-old Georgian man whose body was found last September shortly after receiving hospital treatment for self-harming. An inquest found he had taken his life outside the Wakefield hotel where he was living.

Also included is 63-year-old Colombian man Victor Hugo Pereira Vargas, who appears to have died from self-inflicted wounds last October in an East Sussex hotel.

Earlier this month the coroner investigating his death said he planned to pursue an enhanced inquest procedure allowing an investigation into whether the state failed to protect someone from harm under human rights rules after potential safeguarding issues related to Mr Pereira were alluded to. The Home Office told a hearing that it would oppose such a move because it did not believe human rights issues were relevant to the case.

An expert report warned earlier this year that refugees and asylum seekers in Britain are at higher risk of poor mental health than the general population because of the “complex and unique challenges” that many have faced in reaching their destination and then trying to establish themselves in a new country.

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The study by the Mental Health Foundation, published in February, said “far too little” was known about suicide rates among asylum seekers and its causes, warning: “Poor mental health is a major risk factor for suicide; people with mental health problems have a nearly eight times greater risk of taking their own lives than those without.

“Asylum seekers and refugees also experience many factors that research has shown can lead to suicidal ideation, including: the inability to provide for one’s family, low levels of social support, poor quality of life, and insecure visa status.”

The findings of the investigation by i and Liberty Investigates mean that a total of 27 asylum seekers housed in Home Office accommodation are now thought to have taken their lives in the last four years – three times the total in the previous four years.

Medecins Sans Frontieres UK and Doctors of the World, the two medical charities, whose research at Wethersfield led to them describing a “mental health crisis” at the facility, said asylum seekers were confronting similar issues regardless of their accommodation circumstances.

A spokesperson for the charities said: “Although there are clear differences between hotels and containment sites, the often poor living conditions, safeguarding failures and extended delays people experience lead to various levels of anguish and mental health issues.”

The department added that it would always fully cooperate with any investigation into an individual’s death.

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