Monday, December 05, 2005

The federal government has routinely failed to fulfill its responsibility to protect public safety and security by removing foreign nationals who commit crimes or are the subject of outstanding warrants. We know this thanks to an internal government report obtained by the National Post last spring, which revealed a grossly mismanaged and porous system in which even warrants involving "serious criminality" are sometimes unassigned.

Perhaps no case illustrates the problem more dramatically, and tragically, than that of Mohamed Hagi Mohamud.
Mohamud, a Somali, pled guilty in a B.C. court last Monday to unlawful confinement and sexual assault causing bodily harm, and was sentenced to four and a half years in prison. After midnight on March 14, a knife-wielding Mohamud grabbed Erika Martyn, a 33-year-old mother of three, outside a Surrey SkyTrain station and forced her to his apartment, where she was sexually assaulted, then beaten with punches, kicks and a metal object to the point of losing consciousness four times. She still bears physical and emotional scars from the ordeal.

Complicit in Mohamud's vicious attack is the federal government, since the crimes were entirely preventable.

It turns out that Mohamud, who has been in Canada since 1990, had already served time for a 1997 assault with a weapon, and for a 2002 assault causing bodily harm. Both of those crimes are deportable offences; and yet even after completing his second sentence, Mohamud was not held pending removal. Instead, he was given a hearing date and released into the community.

Predictably, he never turned up for that hearing. Immigration officials are unable to explain why Mohamud was not deported after either of those convictions, or indeed why he was still at large given his history of violence.

Ms. Martyn, a courageous woman who asked in court that the publication ban shielding her identity as a sexual crime victim be lifted so she could speak out, now asks: "Why did this extreme incident have to happen before they started doing anything?"

It is a question that demands an answer.
© National Post