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Breakout and blaze throw asylum policy into chaos
Alan Travis and Steven Morris
Saturday February 16, 2002
The Guardian
Britain's flagship asylum detention centre last night lay in smoking
ruins after a breakout attempt by detainees left £35m worth of
devastation and the government's new hardline deportations policy
facing chaos.
A night of rioting and arson saw half of the £100m Group 4-run Yarl's
Wood "immigration removals centre" near Bedford destroyed as 20
detainees used the cover of the fires to force its main gates. Seven
men and one woman were later recaptured.
Yarl's Wood, which was to be the largest immigration detention centre
in Europe, only opened its doors in November. Before the riot started
on Thursday night it held 384 people out of a potential 900 capacity.
Some faced imminent deportation while others were long-term
immigration detainees who had just been moved out of prison.
Last night the immigration minister, Lord Rooker, who visited the
site yesterday, insisted that the government's attempts to step up
the pace of deportations of rejected asylum seekers would not be
knocked off course by the fire. A new target of 2,500 removals to be
introduced in March would still be met, he insisted.
The incident is believed to have been triggered when Group 4 officers intervened in an
argument between three female detainees over the alleged handcuffing of a woman, aged
55, who required medical attention.
One of the women was restrained by custody officers "and 50 to 60 others piled in and
overpowered the officers", claimed one witness. Group 4 strenuously denied the woman
involved had been handcuffed.
Bedfordshire police announced a criminal investigation into the riot. Acting deputy
chief constable Cliff Dixon said he believed the disturbance at the centre was
premeditated. "There would have been some sort of degree o
f orchestration [reflected by the degree] of response," he said.
The police claim came amid reports that a group of detainees had broken into the
centre's administrative block, smashing the equipment controlling the hundreds of
closed-circuit television cameras on the site and destroyi
ng some key records before the fires were lit on Thursday night.
They were still burning yesterday and reduced one of the two main detention blocks to
a shell. One Group 4 officer who had to jump 15ft from a first-floor window to escape
to safety was among six injured people who were t
reated in hospital.
A GMB union official, Ed Blissett, representing the Group 4 staff, also said that four
women nurses were reportedly "besieged" when they were locked in a room by detainees
while the building was burning.
The official investigations into the breakout will also examine claims by the
Bedfordshire fire brigade that the Home Office had ignored its advice that a sprinkler
system should have been installed in the building, which
opened three months late. Lord Rooker said after his visit: "That does seem
extraordinary. I am having it looked into."
Campaigner Mike Gilmour of the Campaign to Stop Arbitrary Detentions at Yarl's Wood
insisted, despite the official denials, that a protest over the handcuffing of the
55-year-old woman sparked the disturbance.
"For three days she had been seeking to get medical treatment. Last night she was
handcuffed in preparation to take her for treatment and she obviously objected to it.
It has been suggested that this is the final straw th
at sparked it off."
Keith Best of the Immigration Advisory Service, which runs a centre at Yarl's Wood,
said he believed a major factor which had fuelled the disturbance was the government's
decision to step up the pace of deportations: "Whe
n you have a situation which is driven by 'how many can we get rid of' then you are
going to get some stupid decisions."
He said his organisation alone had successfully persuaded the courts to release half a
dozen people from Yarl's Wood because they had been wrongly detained.
Women and children who had been detained at Yarl's Wood were last night evacuated to
other immigration facilities including Campsfield House, near Oxford. The remaining
male detainees were being held in the remaining half
of the centre. The destruction of half of the 900-capacity of the detention centre,
set up to prevent failed asylum seekers disappearing in the final weeks before their
removal, is a blow to the government's plans to exp
and the number of detention places to 4,000. It will also put
ministers under pressure to look again at their promise not to hold
immigration detainees in the already packed prison system.
Juliet Lyon, of the Prison Reform Trust, said last night: "In the
week when the government finally met its pledge to remove asylum
seekers from prison, this tragedy must not be allowed to propel them
back into a prison system that is already full beyond capacity." The
Home Office said prison numbers yesterday topped 69,000 in England
and Wales for the first time.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2002
End<{{{
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