NIGERIAN LADY LATE SAMIRA ADAMU: AN ASYLUM SEEKER WHO DIED IN THE HAND OF BELGIAN POLICE

It was just like yesterday that a Nigerian lady Samira Adamu, 20, was allegedly killed by a Belgium policeman on 22nd of September, 1998.

Sémira Adamu, then an asylum seeker died at the hands of five Belgian policemen in 1998, during a botched deportation attempt aboard a Togo-bound plane after police employed the "cushion technique" to restrain her. Ms Adamu , who was then fleeing a forced marriage to a violent 65-year-old man in Nigeria who already had four wives.

Samira forced into the plane

The manner of her death then forced the country's then interior minister, Louis Tobback, to resign. While a Brussels court handed down suspended sentences to four of the five officers, who claimed then that they were only following orders.

The court ordered then that the Belgian state to pay undisclosed damages to the dead woman's family.

 Louis Tobback

 Hein Diependaele, a lawyer for Ms Adamu's family, welcomed the judgment. "It is symbolic, but it shows something went seriously wrong," he told the VRT TV network.

Samira’s case was a landmark and a turning point in Belgium's #immigration and deportation policy which eventually make the Belgium’s police union immediately announced its members would stop forcibly repatriating refugees and would seek talks with the country's interior minister to discuss the government's policy.

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