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A convicted rapist has avoided deportation back to Afghanistan because the Taliban ‘take a dim view’ of sex offenders.
Ibrahim Ahmadi was stripped of his refugee status when he was jailed for preying on a sleeping woman in Glasgow. But he has now won the right to remain in the UK after judges decided he might incur the anger of the hardline Taliban regime if he were returned.
The 29-year-old successfully claimed he would be persecuted in his homeland for being a member of the minority Hazaras ethnic group, even though two members of the sect have been appointed to the new Afghan government.
The judges also decided that it was ‘reasonably likely that the Taliban would take a dim view of an individual who had committed a violent sexual offence in a Western country’.
Ibrahim Ahmadi (pictured) was stripped of his refugee status when he was jailed for preying on a sleeping woman in Glasgow
The ruling has sparked fury. Russell Findlay, the Shadow Community Safety Minister in Scotland, said: ‘This judgment is extremely concerning and suggests the human rights of a rapist are deemed more important than the safety of the public.
‘Most people couldn’t care less about his sob story on how the Taliban treat sex offenders. They would rather see him removed from our streets and put on the next available flight to Kabul.’
Ahmadi arrived in the UK in 2007 as a 15-year-old, claiming he had been held hostage by the Taliban but had escaped. He was refused asylum but won an appeal and was granted indefinite leave to remain in 2014. That same year, he was arrested for threatening a woman in Lanarkshire and was given addiction counselling.
But just months later, he carried out a vile sex attack on a 25-year-old woman as she slept in her flat.
He was convicted of rape and jailed for seven years. The sentence was later reduced to five years on appeal, although reports by social workers said he continued to pose a high risk to women.
The Home Office ordered Ahmadi’s deportation in 2019 but he used taxpayers’ money to fund a legal challenge that was given a boost when the Taliban seized control of Afghanistan last August – just days before the hearing. In their judgment, Upper Tribunal judges Hugo Norton-Taylor and Tom Wilding accepted that Ahmadi ‘represents a danger to the community of the United Kingdom [and] there remains a very strong public interest in deportation’ but ruled that ‘recent events in Afghanistan’ meant sending him back would breach his human rights.
Despite efforts by the Taliban to assimilate Afghanistan’s six million Hazaras into their regime, for example by including them in the country’s new government, the judges concluded that Ahmadi would ‘be placed directly into the hands of an extremist Sunni organisation with a history of persecutory treatment of Hazaras and/or Shias’.
Ahmadi received £13,562 in legal aid to fight his rape case and appeal, and has had a further £1,330 to support his deportation challenge with the ruling made in November.
The case has echoes of previous deportation sagas, including that of Iraqi paedophile Howri Hamad Garib, 47, who indecently assaulted three 14-year-old girls in a swimming pool in Airdrie, Lanarkshire, in 2004.
He contested a deportation order issued by the Home Office in 2008 and, following an eight-year legal battle, was allowed to remain in the UK because his crimes were not deemed technically serious enough to warrant expulsion.
In another controversial case, Mr Norton-Taylor was one of two judges who last year granted Kosovan drug-dealer Shaban Binaku leave to remain in the UK.
The 41-year-old had already been deported once but re-entered Britain and set up a car-wash business in London before he was arrested in 2018. The Upper Tribunal ruled it would be unreasonable for the two children he fathered while in the UK illegally to relocate to Kosovo.
The Home Office last night said it may try again to deport Ahmadi if circumstances changed in Afghanistan. ‘We always try to remove heinous foreign criminals from this country, but we can be prevented from doing so by the European Convention on Human Rights and Human Rights Act,’ it added.
‘This individual no longer has refugee protection and we will continue to explore all options to remove him from the UK.’ Ahmadi’s lawyer was approached for comment.