Arrests for solidarity with Sudanese refugee deported to torture

This 21 January 2018 video says about itself:

Deported from Belgium, tortured in Sudan – BBC News

Last autumn Belgian authorities invited Sudanese officials to identify Sudanese migrants living in Brussels and speed up deportation. But as reports emerge of torture on return to their home country, has this approach endangered those seeking refuge?

Translated from Dutch NOS TV today:

Three passengers on a KLM flight to Nairobi were arrested on Saturday when they opposed the deportation of a refugee who had exhausted all legal remedies. That happened on the plane at Schiphol airport, just before departure, reports NH News.

On board the aircraft was the 25-year-old refugee Ezzedine Mehimmid.

From Darfur province in Sudan. There, and elsewhere, the dictator of Sudan gets away with massacring his own people because is a buddy of NATO countries’ governments.

He was deported to Sudan by the Netherlands, but according to the Amsterdam refugee group We Are Here, Mehimmid would be arrested and tortured on arrival in Sudan.

To prevent the expulsion, a number of people went into the aircraft, so the flight could not leave. Eventually the military police went in and three people were arrested. According to an eyewitness, that went violently.

Violence

“I was shocked by the amount of violence”, passenger Joost Fontein tells NH News. “The last arrested person, a young woman, was even taken into a headlock and dragged out by the policemen.”

…

Video images deleted

There are no video images of the incident. According to Fontein, this is because passengers were forced to remove the images from their cellphones. “When they saw that I was filming everything, I was told quite harshly that I could choose: remove everything or also leave the plane in shackles.” Eventually he decided to remove his images.

According to the military police, KLM staff has indicated that according to the house rules filming is not allowed on the plane. …

Is that a general rule? If that rule would have been enforced, then it would, eg, been impossible to prove that a British white bigot insulted an African Jamaican woman sitting next to him in an Ryanair plane with racist words.

Amnesty

The flight to Nairobi eventually left half an hour later than planned. Via Nairobi Mehimmid was then brought to Sudan. Human rights organization Amnesty International says that nothing has been heard from him since.

Thursday, January 10, 2019. More deaths in Sudan as Communists report arrest of spokesman Fathi Alfadl: here.

Monday, January 21, 2019. Sudanese forces accused of an ‘unbridled killing spree’ as anti-government protests continue: here.

Hundreds of thousands of Sudanese workers and peasants have staged nationwide protests since December 19 that are the biggest threat to the rule of President Omar al-Bashir since he came to power in a 1989 coup: here.