Aamir Ageeb

Aamir Ageeb (born August 3, 1968 in Khartoum , Sudan ; † May 28, 1999 ) was a Sudanese refugee who suffered willful bodily harm when he was deported on board the Lufthansa flight LH 588 from Frankfurt am Main via Cairo to Khartoum died by police officers .

Asylum procedure

Aamir Ageeb and his family were affected by the civil war in Sudan . One of his brothers died in the course of the war and another was imprisoned for political reasons. On April 9, 1994 Ageeb managed to escape to the Federal Republic of Germany and on May 4, 1994 he applied for asylum. The application was initially rejected on August 25, 1995. Since he had married a German woman in the meantime, he was granted the right to stay and withdrew his asylum application on April 17, 1996, which was not yet final.

After the marriage broke up, according to Amnesty International , his residence permit was limited to June 4, 1998 and he was asked to leave the country. According to the first press and BMI reports, he did not fulfill his obligation to leave the country and was put out to be searched . Ageeb and his attorney, who objected to a deportation order, assumed that his stay was legal. He also registered at his residence in Wedel on April 1, 1998. Even so, it was reported that Ageeb was "in hiding". When Ageeb reported the theft of his jacket to the police in Karlsruhe on April 9, 1999, he was arrested at the station.

Since then he has been in detention in the Mannheim JVA. An unaccompanied repatriation planned for April 16, 1999 had to be postponed at short notice because he threatened an employee of the immigration authorities with a knife and the authorities refused to allow him to be deported without security escort.

Aamir Ageeb was due to be deported on May 28, 1999. In the detention cell, his hands and feet were handcuffed with cable ties . The cuffs were then bandaged behind his back while he was in the prone position. On the way to the plane he was also put on a motorcycle helmet and tied his thighs with a rope. Tied up like this, he was carried head first into the Lufthansa plane and seated in the middle of a row of three seats. In the aircraft, his arms were also fixed to the backrests and his legs to the seat with Velcro tape because he had kicked the front seat with his legs. The seat belt was also fastened. His ankles should have been covered with a jacket that was placed over his lap.

When the plane took off, despite these restraints, he tried to push himself out of his seat and screamed to draw attention to himself. The two BGS officers, who were sitting on the seats next to him on the left and right, then pressed his upper body towards his thighs. The officer on the square in front of Aamir Ageeb also pushed the refugee's head down. When the officers tried to straighten Aamir Ageeb after the seatbelt signs had gone off, they found that he was dead. A later autopsy revealed the cause of death: positional asphyxiation . According to the public prosecutor's office, the “death from suffocation as a result of massive violence”.

Aamir Ageeb's image in the media

In the first press reports, Ageeb painted the picture of a hiding, criminal and rejected asylum seeker, which later turned out to be untenable. Ageeb's death took a back seat. The reports attributed to Ageeb crimes of which security journalists were informed. The BMI corrected this picture soon afterwards, but partially supported the claims. Even in the plane, the BGS is said to have testified to the pilot and the flight crew that Ageeb was a "murderer". "Across the plane, this information apparently billowed up more and more: A steward had told his colleague about the triple murderer , a flight attendant had heard of a murderer and rapist ." After research by Amnesty International , it soon became apparent that the allegations of the BMI and the press, which were not repeated later, cannot be proven. This includes the sexual offenses that were assigned to Ageeb. According to the findings of the responsible public prosecutor in Itzehoe, they cannot be confirmed.

Senior attorney Schlien (Itzehoe) gave the information that a total of three proceedings were pending against Ageeb and all of them were discontinued because of insignificance. It was about trespassing (1997), theft (1998) and fare dodging in the subway (1998). “There is no question of any sexual offenses”. Regarding the allegation of coercion of a minor, Amnesty International writes: “A young woman reported that some black person had sexually insulted her. The police then called any black man who came close to the description of the young woman to the police station. When the woman saw Ageeb, she did not identify him. Amnesty International is unable to say anything about the “serious accusation of marital rape”: “Ageeb's ex-wife has completely withdrawn and does not comment on the case at all.” The Federal Ministry of the Interior later only commented very much evading criticism of his press work. No evidence was presented to support the allegations against Ageeb other than the discontinued proceedings, nor were these allegations repeated either by the Federal Ministry of the Interior or the media. The human rights organization RES publica informs about Ageeb's death and the media reactions and legal consequences via its own portal www.aamirageeb.de .

Legal consequences

On October 18, 2004 the judgment was announced in the trial against BGS officials Jörg Heinrich S., Reinhold S. and Taner D. before the Frankfurt am Main regional court. After that, the officers were guilty of willful bodily harm resulting in death . Due to the "organizational chaos" at the BGS, this criminal act was assessed as a less serious case and a reduction in the sentence was made because the statutory minimum sentence of one year in prison would have resulted in the loss of the civil servant status and this penalty was then no longer proportionate a suspended prison sentence of 9 months was imposed. In addition, the police officers were each sentenced to pay the Ageebs family € 2,000. The criminal chamber pointed out that the superiors of the accused and the officials involved in the inadmissible restraint methods were jointly responsible for the organizational failure in the BGS. The chairman of the chamber compared the conditions in the detention center with the conditions in the Iraqi Abu Ghraib prison .

Political Consequences

Immediately after the incident, the Ministry of the Interior issued a ban on forced deportations, which was lifted in June 1999.

The death led to various inquiries to the Federal Ministry of the Interior. In response to a request in August 1999, the Ministry made it clear for the first time that the captain alone had the authority to command on board .

After deportations with a helmet initially appeared discredited, Otto Schily had a new helmet with bite protection and better breathing tested eleven months after Ageeb's death. A new restraint system developed in the USA is to be used.

In 2002, the Council of Europe criticized human rights violations caused by the practice of deporting rejected asylum seekers. a. the death of Aamir Ageeb. The report noted a “significant increase in incidents over the past two years. This shows that these are not isolated cases in which the people waiting for their deportation are exposed to discrimination, racist language, dangerous restraint methods, even life-threatening violence as well as inhuman and degrading treatment in violation of the European Convention on Human Rights. "

The anti-torture committee of the Council of Europe ( CPT ) classified the anti-torture committee of the Council of Europe ( CPT ) on 6 July 2001 and in spring 2003 as torture .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c} ai-JOURNAL, volume 11: The case of Aamir Ageeb . RES publica . November 1999. Archived from the original on January 17, 2008. Retrieved on August 13, 2009.
2. ↑ Bernd Mesovic: Press release / hogtief restraint in BGS detention cell (PDF; 107 kB) Pro Asyl . July 28, 2005. Accessed on October 11, 2010.  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
3. ^ Frankfurter Rundschau : Like a tied bundle . RES publica. February 3, 2004. Archived from the original on April 6, 2009. Retrieved on August 13, 2009.
4. ↑ Report to the Interior Committee of the German Bundestag on the death of Sudanese national Aamir Omer Mohamed Ahmed AGEEB when he was returned on May 28, 1999  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Federal Ministry of the Interior , June 1999  
5. ↑ Frankfurter Rundschau · Yvonne Holl: Pilot thought Ageeb was a “murderer” · Serious allegations against BGS in the process of the death of the Sudanese . RES publica. February 5, 2004. Archived from the original on April 6, 2009. Retrieved on August 13, 2009.
6. ↑ Documentation page Aamir Ageeb . RES publica. Archived from the original on June 27, 2009. Retrieved on August 13, 2009.
7. ↑ ^{a b c} Detlef Esslinger: Mild punishments for BGS officials . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung . October 18, 2004. Retrieved on August 13, 2009.  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
8. ↑ Suspended sentences for border guards. In: Rheinische Post . October 18, 2004, accessed October 9, 2015 . 
9. ↑ Bernd Mesovic: Press release · Judgment in the process of Aamir Ageeb's death during deportation (PDF; 135 kB) Pro Asylum . October 18, 2004. Archived from the original on October 27, 2005. Retrieved October 7, 2010.
10. ↑ Süddeutsche Zeitung : Answer from the Federal Ministry of the Interior causes excitement among pilots. Border guards have nothing to say on board. . RES publica. August 31, 1999. Archived from the original on April 6, 2009. Retrieved on August 13, 2009.
11. ↑ New bite protection . In: Der Spiegel . No. 18 , 2000 ( online ).
12. ^ Neue Zürcher Zeitung , February 2, 2002
13. ↑ Deportation practice . ITZ . Retrieved on August 13, 2009.  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  

Web links

• Documentation page Aamir Ageeb . RES publica . Retrieved August 13, 2009.