A NIGERIAN Catholic priest who was arrested at Dublin airport and put in jail on suspicion of trying to enter the country illegally was only released following the intervention of the Nigerian ambassador.
Fr John Achebe (33), a parish priest in the central Nigerian city of Onitsha, was stopped by officers from the Garda National Immigration Bureau (GNIB) after arriving on a flight from Istanbul on Tuesday. He was wearing his clerical garb at the time.
He was taken to Cloverhill Prison, strip-searched and placed in a cell for the night with four other inmates. He was released the following day when the Nigerian ambassador, Mandu Ekong-Omaghomi, intervened with immigration officials and gave guarantees on his behalf.
Nigerian embassy spokesman John Ishaye said immigration officials should have checked with the embassy before sending him to jail. “We could have told them he was a reverend father and a man of certain standing,” he said.
Fr Achebe arrived in Ireland on a tourist visa. He was due to visit his relative, Dr Chinwednu Udegbe, who is a psychiatrist at the Mid-Western Regional Hospital in Limerick.
It is understood that immigration officials became suspicious when Fr Achebe said initially that he was a brother and then a cousin of Dr Udegbe, the terms having a wider meaning in Nigerian culture than they would have here. The pair are distant cousins.
He was refused permission to land on the grounds that the reasons he gave for entering the State were false.
Fr Achebe was told on Wednesday that he would be taken to Dublin airport for deportation, but when he arrived at the airport he was, instead, told to report to the immigration bureau on September 30th, the day he was due to leave in any case. Gardaí also kept his passport.
Nobody from the GNIB was available for comment yesterday evening, but in a letter to Fr Achebe’s solicitor Gerry Cullen, the bureau said Fr Achebe was “lawfully and appropriately refused permission” and his release was “an entirely exceptional circumstance done as a gesture of goodwill to the ambassador” and to Fr Achebe.
Fr Achebe declined to comment yesterday, but Dr Udegbe said it had been a humiliating experience for him.
“The pain that he has is that he was made to take away all his clothes before the other four inmates of his room and the other warders around. He said that nobody had seen his nakedness since he became an adult. This man does not like violence in any form. This is a huge embarrassment to him.”
Fr Gerry Kane, who has been given pastoral care of foreign nationals by the Archdiocese of Dublin, said the arrest and detention of visitors like Fr Achebe is a regular occurrence. “The system needs to be both robust and just, but, what this case illustrates, is that this has not been achieved.
“Can you imagine what it would be like to turn up to visit relatives in America or Australia with all your papers in order and you are put in prison? It is a frightening experience,” he said.
Mr Cullen said flaws in the 2004 Immigration Act allowed the State to detain visitors from certain countries at will. “To my mind, it is a denial of fundamental rights, it is a denial of constitutional justice,” he said. “The law states that the immigration officer may refuse to give permission to land if the officer is satisfied on certain grounds, but the question is how is this officer satisfied?”
