Snatched family's nightmare ordeal

AN ALGERIAN asylum-seeker, deported three weeks ago after a dawn raid, has told of her depression and despair at being uprooted from her Plymouth home.

Leila Douik, speaking to The Herald from the Algerian village of Blida, said she, her husband Fouzi and their four children had spent the past 21 days crammed into her mother-in-law's house with more than a dozen other family members.

The couple lived in Plymouth for seven years while their application for asylum was being considered. They fled Algeria after Mr Douik was called to give evidence in a trial against the terrorist group GIA. He feared the gunmen would kill him first.

Before fleeing to Plymouth, his oldest son Mohamed, now 14, was hit in the eye by shrapnel from a bullet passing through their house. He was left blind in one eye after the incident when he was aged six or seven.

Their youngest children, Adam, six, and 18-month-old baby Sabrina, were born in this country.

Officers from the UK Border Agency smashed down the door of their home in Carlton Terrace, St Judes, at 5am on November 18 and took them away. Seven hours later they were on a plane bound for Algeria.

Mrs Douik said that she and Mohamed were suffering from depression and were now on medication.

Mrs Douik, 38, said: "I can't sleep at night. We are scared because we don't trust the authorities here.

"It's very severe for a woman. You can't go out and you have to wear the hijab [a headscarf worn by Muslim women].

"There's no school for the children because they don't speak Arabic, so they just sit in the house all day.

"My mother-in-law doesn't speak English, so I have to translate for my kids.

"Everything has changed here. You can't find a job. We haven't got a house, and everything is expensive.

"I would love to come back to be with the people in Plymouth. They are my family. I have lived there for the past seven years.

"I don't understand why this happened. It's not fair."

Mrs Douik said she spoke to the Home Office in Croydon the day before the raid.

"They said we would have to wait. They said, 'You are in a queue'. We were very happy because we thought we were finished with worrying.

"Then they came on the Tuesday morning. We were all screaming because it was such a big shock.

"The men said to us, 'You have to go. You have to go.' They put handcuffs on my husband and they told me, 'If you don't get dressed we'll take you in your pyjamas.

"They drove us to London and then to Heathrow. We had no food or drink until we got on the plane at 2.30pm."

The family was put on board an Air Algeria airliner, with an escort of nine British officials.

"They put my husband between two strong men," Mrs Douik said. "It was so horrible.

"The children said to me, 'Mum, we don't want to go. That's our life'. Especially my oldest, Mohamed. He starts his GCSEs next year."

In Algiers the authorities confiscated their passports. They were told they must now wait at least five years before they can apply for new passports.

"We were there for six hours being interviewed and having our fingerprints and photos taken," Mrs Douik said. "They said, 'We don't understand how you got to England'.

"Because I had a baby they told me to go, but they kept my husband for two days.

"We were lucky because we know someone who could keep checking up on him."