Abdulrahman Mohammed outside London’s High Court.(Picture; Richard Gittins / Champion News)

A violent criminal with more than 30 convictions has won almost £80,000 in compensation from the government after being locked up for too long.

Abdulrahman Mohammed, 39, from Shepherd’s Bush, London, was ruled ‘falsely imprisoned’ for 445 days by the Home Office, while they were trying to deport him.

Judge Edward Pepperall QC, told the High Court: ‘Mr Mohammed is prolific and violent offender. I can well understand why the Home Secretary might wish to deport him.

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‘She has not, however, been able to do so, largely because of the very real risk that deportation to Somalia would pose.’


Mohammed has been jailed 13 times for crimes including affray, knife possession and multiple charges of assault and robbery.



The judge awarded him £78,500 in compensation as there was no prospect of deporting him while he was kept in immigration detention for three periods between 2012 and 2016.

The Royal Courts of Justice building (Picture; DANIEL LEAL-OLIVAS/AFP/Getty Images)

Mr Mohammed suffered torture and ‘unimaginable barbarity’ when he was 13 and living with his family in Mogadishu, the judge said.

The court head how his uncle was shot dead and a girl was raped in front of him, before thugs sliced through his cheeks with bayonets in a bid to cut out his tongue.

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After he managed to flee Somalia, he spent two years in a refugee camp before finally making his way to Britain in 1996, aged 17.

The account of the horrors he endured in his homeland was ‘rightly not challenged’ and he had been left with a legacy of post-traumatic stress disorder.

Mr Mohammed ‘enjoyed the freedoms of western society’ and slipped into life as ‘a habitual and violent criminal’, the court heard.

The judge listed a total of 30 convictions on his record between 1998 and 2013, for which he served 13 custodial sentences.

After being refused asylum on entering Britain, he had been granted leave to remain – but only until August 2000.

Judge Perrerall said the Home Office lawyers accepted at a late stage in the case that he had been unlawfully detained (Picture; Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images)

In January 2008, the Home Secretary made a deportation order against him, but lawyers took his case to the European Court of Human Rights, and the UK was ordered not to remove him from the country ‘until further notice’.

The judge concluded: ‘Some reading this judgment might well question why a foreign citizen who has so thoroughly abused the hospitality of this country by the commission of serious criminal offences is entitled to any compensation.

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‘But there are few principles more important in a civilised society than that no one should be deprived of their liberty without lawful authority.

‘It is essential, where a person is unlawfully imprisoned by the state, that an independent judiciary should hold the executive to account.

‘Justice should be done to all people. He is not the most wicked of men, but his presence in the UK is not conducive to public good.

‘Nevertheless, in a civilised society, he is entitled to justice.’