Activists blocked London Stansted Airport runway to stop deportation flight to Nigeria and Ghana

The London Stansted Airport was briefly forced to close on Tuesday after several activists took to the runway of the airport to block a plane filled with asylum seekers being deported to Nigeria and Ghana.Police dealt with the incident involving 14 protesters who took to the tarmac and had surrounded a parked plane in an attempt to stop the flight. The activists said they were attempting to keep a "deportation flight" used to remove failed asylum seekers grounded at the Essex airport.  

Using tubes and chains, the campaigners including members of the Lesbians and Gay Support the Migrants group, locked on to each other and a pyramid structure and refused to leave the runway until the flight is cancelled.

The charter flight was due to fly asylum seekers and migrants to Nigeria and Ghana, but many on board claimed that their lives will be in danger should they be deported.

 

Among those due to board is a 21-year-old asylum seeker who said his brother and grandfather were killed in Nigeria.

"Both of my parents are in the UK, they are British. I have been here, with them for over 5 years but the Home Office wants to send me back to Nigeria. They say I cannot stay here with my parents anymore. My brothers are here. I am in fear to go back to Nigeria. They killed my grandfather."

Others on the flight include a Ghanaian man who’ had lived in the UK for 18 years. His wife, brother, nieces and nephews are still in Britain, and he says he’ll commit suicide if taken to Ghana. 

“What do the they expect me to do? They are trying to deport me when I don’t have one penny in my pocket,” he said. “How can I leave me wife in this country? How can I leave my brother and his children in this country? My family and my life is here in the UK. If they take me back to Ghana I will kill myself.”

Another woman with British parents also on the flight, said she has no family in Nigeria and says that a doctor has declared her unfit to fly.

 

 

Speaking to reporters, Emma Hughes, an activist with End Deportations, who is one of the activists that blockaded the runway said she has put her body on the line to stop a "brutal system" that's tearing communities and families apart"

"We 've taken this action because many people on this flight are being placed in serious danger by being callously deported back to Nigeria and Ghana. There's been a lot of attention recently on Trump's racist Muslim ban, but what's happening in the Uk is equally repellant." she said. 

"People are being rounded up in the middle of the night based on their perceived nationality, forced on to planes in undisclosed locations and strapped down in their seats with no one witnessing the violence they are facing. Do we really want to live in the sort of society where theses violent and secretive mass deportations are being normalised?" she added.