How could 'bleeding heart' plane passengers stop my rapist being deported? Young mum whose 'screaming' Somali attacker was kept in the UK by Heathrow mutiny reveals her fury at their intervention
The 27-year-old mother sitting beside me on a suburban park bench is trembling with a mixture of fear and rage. She can barely suppress her anger as she recalls the moment she watched a video of a refugee being escorted from an aircraft at Heathrow after a mutiny by passengers halted his deportation.
As The Mail on Sunday revealed last year, that man was Yaqub Ahmed, a Somalian who a decade earlier had been convicted and jailed with three others for a sickening gang rape.
Today his victim breaks her silence and, in an exclusive interview, condemns the holidaymakers who stepped in to defend him, ignorant of the horrifying attack that ripped her life apart.
In the video, filmed by a passenger, Ahmed, 29, is seen screaming as a group of people on board bellow at officials to ‘take him off the plane!’
For Hannah (not her real name), those pantomime-style cries were as nothing compared to her terrified screams as she fought for her life during Ahmed’s gang’s attack in a dingy flat in North London in August 2007 when she was just 16.
‘You think that was a bad scream? Try hearing the screams that I made,’ says Hannah in a powerful message to the ‘bleeding heart’ passengers who decided to intervene in Ahmed’s deportation.
And she asks them: ‘How could you defend a rapist? How could you intervene? He was in handcuffs, he was being taken out of the country… who are you people to interfere with justice?
‘Fair enough you didn’t know the situation, but now I hope you feel proud of yourselves because you stopped something that I have waited for for so long: something that made me feel that little bit safer.’
Her four tormentors were jailed for a total of 35 years and, while one is believed to have died after fleeing to Syria to fight for the Islamic State group, she is haunted by the thought of seeing the others who have now been released and remain in the UK.
Ahmed’s deportation would have given Hannah a modicum of comfort, but since the failed attempt to kick him out, her mental health has collapsed.
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