Ali Aghaei Khaneghahi, Hesam Alireza and Mohammad Reza Hamian refused to board the flights for Turkey on Monday. Their asylum requests have been rejected.
by Jean-Pierre Stroobants (Brussels, correspondent)
Three Iranians refused, Monday, January 23, to embark on thefts which were to bring them from Brussels to Turkey, a country they risk, they say, to be expelled to Tehran. The asylum applications they submitted to Belgium have been rejected recently while two of them say they feared for their lives if they are forced to return to Iran, where they would have taken part in the demonstrations against power.
The members of a support group had gathered at Zaventem airport to protest against the expulsion, in the morning, of Ali Aghaei Khaneghahi, aged in his forties, then, in In the afternoon, Hesam Alireza, 22, and his cousin Mohammad Reza Hamian, 21. These two young men claim that they left their country in October 2022, when the police sent them convocations. According to these documents, seen by journalists from the RTBF public channel but not authenticated, they had to explain their participation in “riots and public order disorders”. The cousins say they have demonstrated in Anzali, a port city of the Guilan province to protest against the death of Mahsa Amini, arrested in September for a veil deemed “badly worn”.
In December 2022 and at the beginning of January, the Office of Foreigners, then the general police station for refugees and stateless and, finally, the Conseil des littieux des foreigners – an independent chamber of appeal – did not judge their convincing explanations; The two men invoked the malfunction of the Internet in Iran to explain their difficulties in providing other evidence. For their support committee, the executions to which the regime proceeds – four men have been hanged in recent weeks – are a sufficient reason for Belgium not to expulsion.
returned to Turkey
The Belgian authorities take refuge behind the fact that the two asylum seekers would not be returned to Iran, but to Turkey, which would not have – at this stage at least – delivered by order of order expulsion against them. Questioned on Monday, the Secretary of State for Asylum and Migration, Nicole de Moor, also maintains that the analysis of the file of the two young people was “individual and meticulous” and that we cannot consider that all Iranians are threatened today by the regime. The two young men would also have family in Turkey, argues Belgium.
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