TOUGH methods of evicting asylum-seekers from Germany were condemned by a judge yesterday after the trial of three border guards who caused the death of a Sudanese refugee in a forced flight home.

The refugee, Aamir Ageeb, 30, was frogmarched by the guards on to a Lufthansa Airbus five years ago. Because he insisted on speaking to the captain and tried to shout “Get me off this plane”, the guards rammed a motorbike helmet on to his head.

He was tied with cable around his ankles and wrists and bound across his upper thighs and upper arms. The aircraft was stalled on the ground because of bad weather and so Mr Ageeb was allowed to drink water through a straw pushed through a hole in the visor of his helmet.

After take-off, he tried to shout and his head was forced down to his knees. Shortly afterwards he suffocated.

Judge Heinrich Gehrke sentenced the three guards — named only as Reinhold S, Taner D and Jörg S — to a nine-month suspended jail term. However, his ire was turned on the Government.

“There were no guidelines or instructions for these men, their training was inadequate and their superiors were uninterested,” the judge said. The point was to get troublesome asylum-seekers out of the country as quickly as possible. “The frontier guard service leadership carries a large share of the responsibility for not giving clearer instructions.”

Otto Schily, the Interior Minister, banned the use of motorcycle helmets after the incident, but, according to human rights activists, helmets are back in use. “They are legal again, as are whole body straitjackets,” Bernd Mesovic, of the refugee lobbying group Pro Asyl, said.

The case became so controversial — it was part of the ideological debate about whether to relax or tighten conditions for asylum-seekers — that it took more than five years of hearings and testimonials between the death of Mr Ageeb and the verdict yesterday. The men were found guilty of causing grievous bodily harm with fatal consequences.

Germany was once the most welcoming European Union country for asylum-seekers, but the hundreds of thousands of refugees from the Balkan wars in the 1990s put immense strain on the welfare system and contributed to a revival of the xenophobic far Right.

The rules have been tightened in the past two years. Germany now expels more than 20,000 people a year by aircraft — 26,286 in 2002 and 23,944 last year.

As a result of the Ageeb case, some of those directly involved in the deportation process began to revolt. Pilots working for Lufthansa, the German airline, refused to accept tied-up passengers on board. Initially they also refused to take federal border guards on commercial flights, but they relaxed their stance after the terrorist attacks in the United States on September 11, 2001.

The problem that most troubles human rights organisations is that of chartered deportations — aircraft, commissioned by several EU countries, that carry large groups of expelled refugees back to their homeland.

“It’s not clear who’s in charge on these flights,” Herr Mesovic said. “According to the laws of the air, it is the captain, but on such chartered flights it is not clear who has the say.”

“These deportations are happening in the middle of the night or from small airports,” Herr Mesovic said. “The point of the exercise is: if it’s not in public view, there can be no neutral witnesses.”

Certainly, that Mr Ageeb was expelled on a commercial flight helped to stir up the national debate.

The guards were in the back row of the Airbus in direct view of a mother, whose child started to scream when the police forced down their prisoner’s head, breaking six of his ribs. The aircraft was in turmoil as three doctors, on board on their way to a conference, tried to revive Mr Ageeb and release his bindings.

The judge was scathing about the training given to the guards. “It was five days,” one of the guards told the court. “On the first day, we arrived and settled in, then we had role-playing games; on the third day we got our jaundice jab, and the rest of the time we discussed how to deal with our travel expenses.” Mr Ageeb had contested his deportation, claiming that he had fled the army in Sudan and could expect arrest if he returned. Court documents showed that he had visited Sudan the previous year to attend to his dying father and no official action was taken against him.

Doubts about the reason why he fled Sudan ensured his expulsion. Under current rules, Mr Ageeb would have been expelled even faster.

ASYLUM-SEEKERS IN GERMANY

In the same year, 154,547 immigrants acquired German citizenship. 104,748 of that total were Asian. They included 64,631 Turks and 13,026 Iranians

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