Posted on 02/15/2004 12:04:29 PM PST by shaggy eel
A Sri Lankan teenager forced to leave New Zealand after being refused asylum was heavily sedated and restrained during her flight home, it was reported last night.
The 16-year-old girl, whose high-profile immigration case here involved claims she suffered years of sexual abuse by male relatives in Sri Lanka, is now at a Catholic convent in the Sri Lankan capital Colombo.
The girl, a Buddhist, was "heavily sedated and motionless in a wheelchair" when she arrived at the airport," a One News reporter said from Colombo last night.
The report said the girl, known as Takshila, had been given drugs for the long flight via Korea.
The girl's grandmother, Somawathy, who fled to New Zealand with her via Hong Kong in 2002, claimed her granddaughter was not well enough to travel after her immigration ordeal.
"She was screaming there (New Zealand) and they dragged her to the plane also," she said.
Somawathy told One News she lied to New Zealand immigration officials when the pair arrived here, and told them they were fleeing political persecution, because she was too ashamed to admit the sexual abuse.
"Still I can't talk, still I can't talk," she said. She claimed her life would always be in danger in Sri Lanka.
The pair were refused asylum seeker status in New Zealand and put on a flight home on Thursday, despite a fight by lawyers and New Zealand Sri Lankans to let the girl stay.
The girl's mother, who works in Hong Kong, was deprived for more than 12 hours of word that her daughter had survived her expulsion from New Zealand, she said last night.
Carole Curtis, a lawyer for the girl, said the mother kept phoning from Hong Kong, desperate for news before receiving a call from her daughter in Sri Lanka late last night.
"She told me her daughter was crying and crying and telling her she was frightened and didn't want to be there."
The grandmother had said the girl had vomited from medicine given to her before and during the flight from Auckland and had kept asking what she had done wrong to be bundled out of an ambulance and on to an aircraft in handcuffs.
Her mother, forced for economic reasons to work overseas as a domestic servant, said she could not afford to lose her job by returning to Sri Lanka and her daughter would be unable to gain a long-term visa for Hong Kong.
"I thought New Zealand was one of the good countries – I never expected it to do such unfair things to my daughter," she said last night.
Ms Curtis claimed her client was in a dangerously dehydrated condition when she left New Zealand, despite clearance from a medical officer who pronounced her physically well.
Middlemore Hospital psychiatric registrar Daniel de Klerk, who examined the girl for the Immigration Service, said in a report that the grandmother told an interpreter the girl had eaten and drunk regularly before her removal.
But he identified the interpreter as Tamil, apparently unaware that the girl and her grandmother spoke a different language, as members of Sri Lanka's Sinhalese majority.
Associate Immigration Minister Damien O'Connor said the girl's removal to Sri Lanka had been done with her welfare in mind, including proper medical supervision before and during the flight.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.