British government used and abandoned me – Ghanaian immigrant

“When I read the case of the terrorist guy, I was so mad,” and this was enough motivation for Maxwell Maundy, a Ghanaian immigrant in London to write an article that had the British police searching for him without success for nearly a year.

The young illegal immigrant chose to report an immigration officer to the British police instead of paying a bribe in exchange for his passport after he was detained.

He says he was abandoned by the British police after going undercover to assist them to arrest and successfully prosecute the corrupt officer despite several promises made to him.

The author of ‘Darkest Humanity’, a book that details the real hardships illegal immigrants face in the United Kingdom says he became even more frustrated when he realised that other prosecution witnesses who had assisted the police to pin down criminals were duly rewarded.

The cases that caught his attention included the Rhys Jones Murder in Liverpool in 2007, a few weeks after his case ended and the Honeymoon Murder in South Africa in 2010.

But the case that broke the camel’s back was that of a foiled terrorist attack in which one suspect was arrested in the United Kingdom while the other was arrested in the United States of America.

Despite the opposition of citizens, the police reached an agreement with the culprit in UK to testify against his counterpart in the US.

“For the US prosecution to now use the British counterpart to testify against his colleague in the US in order for him to be convicted, British government offered so much rewards to the convicted terrorist turned prosecution witness,” he said.

And this didn’t go down well with Maxwell who had not received even his passport back years after it was seized by the British immigration when the case of his illegal stay in the country came up.

“When I read what British government had done to the terrorist turned a prosecution witness, I couldn’t believe it… with that I wrote an article and titled it ‘I want to be a terrorist in London’,” a visibly pained Maxwell Maundy told Paul Adom-Otchere on Metro TV’s ‘Good Evening Ghana’.

Prior to him publishing the article, the Director-General of British Military Intelligence, Section 5 (MI5) had issued a statement about an imminent terror threat to the country, thus, a manhunt for him was launched shortly after the article went public.

Damning the consequences, Maxwell walked into the police station to turn himself in 10 months after the police had been looking for him without success even though he insists he didn’t go into hiding.

His motive for staying quiet all that while, he says was to teach the British government a lesson for not fulfilling the promises made to him after the corrupt immigration officer was jailed.

“If you used me for a case that has cost so much money with promises and you never gave me anything, I wanted to teach them a lesson. I knew they were looking for me, I wasn’t hiding… they were conducting raids and I was blogging the raids...,” he told Paul Adom-Otchere.