AN IRAQI man who stabbed two medical consultants to death in 1991 during a frenzied attack cannot be deported from the UK to his home country.
A British immigration judge has ruled that Laith Alani’s human rights would be breached and that Iraqi people would be at risk as he would not get proper treatment there for his paranoid schizophrenia.
The home office had been planning after his release next year to deport Alani, who admitted manslaughter on grounds of diminished responsibility during his trial. This is in line with its policy of expelling criminals who are non-nationals on their release.
Alani had been sent to a maximum-security hospital after his trial – at which he claimed he killed the doctors because he had been given “a message from Allah”. He is now staying at a less-secure residential home for the mentally ill.
He appealed the home office’s decision to send him back to Iraq to an asylum and immigration tribunal on the grounds that he had come to the UK in 1978 with his family, who subsequently were given leave to stay indefinitely, and he would be denied his rights to a family under the Human Rights Act if he was returned.
The two doctors were killed when Alani was referred to a hospital in Wakefield, South Yorkshire, to have removed an eagle tattoo on one of his arms, inscribed “Republic of Iraq”.
He became agitated when he was told to wait until other patients were treated, and tried to scrape the tattoo from his arm with a knife. He then stabbed Kenneth Paton 24 times in the chest and stomach, and Michael Masser six times in the throat when they tried to restrain him.
The immigration appeals panel, led by Judge Lance Waumsley, vetoed the home office’s deportation ruling because Alani (41) would be unlikely to continue to receive the Clozapine anti-schizophrenia treatment he has been getting under the national health service for the past decade if sent back to Iraq.
“If his present treatment . . . were to be discontinued, as would most likely be the case if he were to be removed to Iraq, the potential consequences would be extremely serious for himself, and potentially life-threatening for innocent third parties around him in the event of his likely, indeed almost inevitable, relapse into a state of paranoid schizophrenia,” the panel said in its judgment on the case.
