Manuel Bravo looked over at his son Antonio, asleep in their spartan cell. He was anxious not to wake him. What Manuel had determined to do had to be done in silence — so that no one would raise the alarm and his beloved son would sleep peacefully, not knowing his father had gone.

Even the pen scratching on the paper as he wrote his final note must have sounded eerily loud in the night-time stillness of Yarl’s Wood detention centre. The grim centre, near Bedford, is a last staging post for failed asylum seekers about to be ejected from Britain.

For Manuel and Antonio, that meant being returned to Angola the next morning, where Manuel’s parents had been murdered and his sisters raped and killed. Manuel, a political activist and opponent of President Jose Eduardo dos Santos’s regime, had lived in fear of being sent home for four years.

Manuel studied his young son’s face and wrote: “Antonio. I am really sorry. I don’t [want] you [to] come to Angola to suffer.” By this point he was too distressed to remember all the words.

Manuel had failed in his efforts to defend his asylum case in person, his pidgin English being no match for his cross-examiners in court, but he understood enough about the British system to know that if his 13-year-old son was an orphan, he would be allowed to stay and finish school.

He wrote one last exhortation: “Be good, son, and do well at school.” He then gathered up a bedsheet and walked out of the cell. A little way down the corridor, he was caught on CCTV unwinding the sheet and fixing one end to the bannister of the stairwell. The other end was tied around his neck.

Just after 1am he was found by staff who frantically tried to revive him. But Bravo’s journey had reached its end. He was 35.

As the inquest into his death, almost exactly a year ago, was held last week, one of the lawyers involved noted: “Nothing anyone could say would more graphically illustrate the desperation felt by many asylum seekers and the sacrifices that a parent will make to secure a better future for their child.”

Manuel’s story, related to the inquest, gave a shocking insight into the brutal realities of the immigration and asylum system. He was a desperate man, up against a faceless and overloaded bureaucracy, represented by lawyers who failed to turn up to hearings and ignored by people who should have realised he was suicidal and clinically depressed.

At Yarl’s Wood, he had reached the end of the road, both physically and metaphorically. As far as he could see, there was only one way out.

BY HIS own account, Manuel came from a prosperous family in the Bie province of Angola. He and his father were farmers with plenty of land.

Their troubles began in 1998 when his father founded a minor political party, the Association of the Youth Democracy (AJDB), to campaign for democracy and against corruption. In December 2000, said Manuel, both he and his father were arrested and detained without charge for six months.

On their release they resumed their political campaigning and within months the authorities came hunting them again. In the early hours of August 29, 2001, claimed Manuel, soldiers raided their farm, killing his parents and raping his sisters.

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