The Home Office threatened to forcibly remove a man from the UK who is likely to be a key witness in the inquest of the asylum seeker who died on the Bibby Stockholm barge.
Leonard Farruku, 26, an asylum seeker from Albania, was found dead on the Bibby Stockholm in Portland, Dorset, used by the Home Office to accommodate hundreds of asylum seekers, on 12 December last year. An inquest is scheduled to open into his death in September 2025.
Yusuf Deen Kargbo, 20, a boxer who competed for Sierra Leone in the 2022 Commonwealth Games in Birmingham before claiming asylum, was Farruku’s roommate on the barge and almost certainly the last person to have seen him alive.
It was Kargbo who raised the alarm when he woke early on the morning of 12 September, found Farruku was not in his bed in the bunk they shared and that the door of the bathroom was locked with no response when Kargbo repeatedly knocked on the door. Police forced open the bathroom door and discovered Farruku’s body.
After Farruku’s death, Kargbo was moved to Home Office accommodation in Wales but said he was woken up there at 6am two and a half weeks ago, arrested and taken to Harmondsworth immigration removal centre, near Heathrow, because the Home Office had rejected his asylum claim.
Speaking to the Guardian on Friday from the detention centre, Kargbo said: “I was called by people in the office at the detention centre yesterday and told to pack my bags because my plane had arrived to return me to Sierra Leone. I told them I was not going and wanted to continue with my asylum claim. They did not force me to go but I don’t know what’s happening now.
“Everything is not fine. I’m so stressed that I can’t eat or sleep. I’m thinking a lot about what happened to me in my country and what happened to Leonard. I had never been through anything like that before. In my asylum accommodation I was going to a boxing gym to keep up with my training, but I can’t do that in detention. I’m feeling sick all the time in this place.”
In 2021, a court ruled that the Home Office had a duty to protect evidence for inquests in immigration detention and should not attempt to deport witnesses to these deaths before evidence relevant to an inquest was secured from them.
It was also found that the Home Office had unlawfully tried to deport a key witness to the death of Oscar Okwurime in Harmondsworth in 2019.
While the Bibby Stockholm barge is not an immigration detention centre, Farruku’s family have argued the barge was a form of quasi-detention for him.
Lawyers for Farruku’s family intervened in the planned deportation of Kargbo on Thursday, reminding the government that Kargbo had significant evidence about his death. If Kargbo had been forcibly returned to Sierra Leone on Thursday he would not have been able to attend the inquest.
Kargbo remains fearful that the Home Office may try again to remove him. “I do not know what is going to happen to me. I’m very scared,” he said.
The Home Office declined to comment on the case.
Charlotte Khan, the head of public affairs and advocacy at Care4Calais, said: “The last government promised that the death of Leonard Farruku would be fully investigated, but that would not be possible if officials removed a key witness from the country before the inquest into Leonard’s death.
“The new government may have announced that the Bibby contract will not be renewed, but the pain and trauma the barge has inflicted will live on in all those who were forced to reside on it. We will never fully know how awful conditions onboard were if the government removes key witnesses like Leonard’s roommate before what happened that fateful night is fully investigated.”
