Afghan migrant woman 'hunted down to Europe by abusive husband' By James Badcock

Madrid Published duration 5 December 2016 Related Topics Europe migrant crisis

image caption There are fears for Lina, seen here with her daughter and a volunteer

Lina's only crime was "being born a woman in Afghanistan", she says.

Forced into marrying a man 25 years her senior after he had allegedly raped her, this 23-year-old Tajik woman from Kabul is now in a Greek camp for migrants.

But Lina told the BBC that the abusive husband she ran away from is now following her, threatening to kill her for disobeying him.

Her story was corroborated by volunteers for a Spanish refugee charity.

Lina's husband is one step behind her and her two small children, having reached the Greek island of Lesbos shortly after she was transported to mainland Greece.

"I was raped by this man when I was 16. He has tortured me, abused me and left me without food for days," Lina says by telephone from inside one of the camp's hundreds of white caravan-style blocks, which she shares with her three-year-old son, two-year-old daughter and her mother, who also decided to flee Afghanistan.

The family group left Kabul earlier this year, travelling through Pakistan, Iran, and Turkey before making the perilous sea crossing to Lesbos.

"Now he has found me," Lina says.

"He followed me all the way through Turkey and now he is on Lesbos waiting patiently to reach the mainland and fulfil his promise to kill me. He missed me on the island, otherwise he would have killed me there.

"He knows where I am, which camp I am in."

image caption Lina's two-year-old daughter (above) is at the moment growing up in a camp in mainland Greece

Iris Sequera, a volunteer at the camp from Barcelona, brought Lina's plight to the attention of a Spanish group which works to have refugees accepted by Spain's authorities.

Refugees Welcome in Spain has included her in a list of 22 especially vulnerable cases, but they are still waiting for a decision by the Spanish government.

Meanwhile, Ms Sequera says that Lina's husband has issued threats to the family through Facebook.

"One day someone I didn't know added me as a friend on Facebook and wrote something in Arabic-looking letters. He said he was Lina's husband and asked about her, but I said I knew nothing about it and blocked him," says Ms Sequera.

The young volunteer says that Lina's husband wrote again with a false name saying he knew where his wife and children were because he had applied for family reunification on Lesbos and a charity had given him the information.

"He said he knew the exact caravan she is in," Ms Sequera says. "He also threatened me and said I was a traitor."

image copyright AP image caption Hundreds of thousands of migrants have arrived in Greece since the beginning of the year

Refugees Welcome in Spain says that Lina has been given permission to lock her shelter, something that is generally not allowed on her camp.

But Ms Sequera fears for Lina's life if she is not transferred out of Greece soon.

Madrid's left-wing city council has told the Spanish government that it is happy to take in Lina and has accommodation lined up for her arrival. But it is Spain's interior ministry which decides on immigration and asylum cases.

Spain had resettled 867 asylum seekers up to the end of October, after committing to accept more than 17,000 under European Union agreements.

The government's policy is not to discuss individual asylum cases.

Meanwhile, Lina is stuck in limbo.

"Please help me escape from this hell and have another opportunity in this life. Before I was a young girl with ambition and dreams of being able to study and be independent, but in Afghanistan those rights were denied to me," she says.