The French Tourists Story, in his own words, and a Third Case of Mistaken Detention!
The ABC News Investigative Unit have published the transcript of their background story and interview with Mahamadou Sacko, the French tourist who was wrongly detained after immigration services thought (wrongly) that he was travelling on a forged passport and didn’t bother to check with the French embassy. Some of it reads like a Monty Python sketch, the quote in the previous story mentions that they told him they wouldn’t call the French Embassy, that it was his job to phone them. But it then gets worse..
ANDREW FOWLER: Did you have money to do that?
MAHAMADOU SACKO: No, because they keep all my money.
It gets even more surreal when, rather than contact the French embassy..
ANDREW FOWLER: In their attempts to establish Sacko’s nationality, immigration officials resorted to unusual tactics. They asked him to name the French president, the tallest mountain in France and to sing the French national anthem.
With questions like that I’m suprised they didn’t go on to ask him why he wasn’t wearing a stripy shirt and riding a bicycle with a string of onions around his neck..
To round things off Kerry Nettle, a Greens Senator for NSW, has said that her office was told of a South Korean woman who was wrongly locked up in Baxter detention center for one or two weeks in the mistaken belief she was an illegal immigrant caught in an immigration raid.
June 9th, 2006 at 10:46 pm
[...] Well it seems we have the answer, the Australian Government hasn’t just managed to lock up one of its own nationals as an illegal immigrant by mistake once, twice or three times (not to mention wrongfully deporting someone), it’s actually managed to do it an extra 26 times in the last 10 years. Mr Georganas says the reply last week from the Attorney-General and former immigration minister Philip Ruddock confirmed most cases have been settled out of court. [...]