A Ghanaian man described as a gangster has been deported from the UK, media reports have said Friday March 27, 2009.
The 21-year-old man described as a dangerous and violent gang member from Croydon has been the first man to be deported under a new scheme.
An immigration court ruled he was a threat to public safety and marched him onto a plane at Heathrow and back to Ghana.
The new operation involves police officers from the Met’s Intelligence Bureau, Serious Crime Directorate, Territorial Policing and the Joint Immigration Crime Team.
The alliance has been created between the MPS and United Kingdom Borders Agency to remove people benefiting from immigration-related crime in London boroughs.
The gang member, a previous resident of Croydon, was accompanied back to Accra, the capital of Ghana, and has been banned from entering the UK for ten years, the reports said.
According to the reports, the man who first came to join his family in Britain at the age of 15, was a member of a Croydon gang that is heavily involved in firearms, drugs and serious violence.
He himself has been arrested at least nine times for robberies, drugs and driving offences.
The reports said, up until now, only foreign nationals who had met a threshold of having spent at least two years out of a five year period in prison were considered for expulsion from the UK.
The new approach identified police intelligence as being highly relevant to the Immigration and Asylum Tribunal (IAT) courts’ duty to consider all relevant information when deciding on a person’s right to remain in the UK.
This was the first time in the UK a case of this kind had been put forward by the cross-agency team and independently assessed by the IAT.
Acting Detective Superintendent, Stuart Dark of the Met Intelligence Bureau, said: “This is a great example of what cross-agency working and more proactive use of existing legislation can achieve.
“This is an extremely effective method of dealing with very harmful individuals we have identified who are otherwise likely to commit more serious crimes in the future, thus putting the community increasingly at risk.”
Tony Smith Regional Director for the UK Border Agency in London and South East said: “The UK Border Agency takes the view that any foreign national allowed into this country should behave themselves and not break our laws.
“We will use all of the powers available to us to deport anyone whose presence is believed not to be conducive with the public good.
“The criminal justice system doesn’t always neccasarily work and when people do not behave, if we can, we will deport them.”
