They made worldwide headlines in 2000 when they fled the Taliban by hijacking a Boeing 727 on an internal flight from Kabul and forcing the crew to fly to England.
Armed with guns and explosives, they held the plane at Stansted Airport for 70 hours before giving themselves up to police and SAS...
The nine are not allowed to work, but instead depend on state hand-outs and report regularly to the immigration authorities.
The cost to the taxpayer of the whole affair has been unofficially estimated at around 10 million pounds.
Meanwhile another UK court decides that a Crouch End twat caught hacking US computers in search of UFOs can be extradited to America under terrorism laws.
Last year Twat told the Guardian he had carried out most of his hacks in a north London house belonging to his girlfriend's aunt.
He claimed to have uncovered evidence of a secret space army of US "non-terrestrial officers".
In a lengthy judgment, District Judge Evans rejected arguments including the possibility that Mr McKinnon could suffer prejudice at his trial because of his political opinions.
He added: "I readily accept, if convicted in the US, the probable sentence is likely to be appreciably harsher in the US than, in comparable circumstances, it would be in the UK.
"It must be obvious to any defendant that if you choose to commit a crime in a foreign country, you run the risk of being prosecuted in that country."
3 comments:
And your point is what exactly?
That you are the Daily Express?
That you are the Guardian?...(facile and tabloid) sounding a bit like the Daily Express (yes, and now every day - not just on Saturdays) and, yes, all through the 'paper' - not just in G2...
Oh I know what you are saying is:'People are stupid' (and love means nothing in some strange quarters?) - or are you really working on a sort of naive parody of Crooked Timber - motto 'Out of the Crooked Timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made' - which if you think about is a sort of perfect circle of nonsense since it raises the Spike Milliganesque questions of how the observer could ever possibly tell.
Meanwhile back in the real world the hijack was in 2000 - they were ultimately found not guilty in 2001 after being convicted - probabaly a sort of they were escaping the evil Taliban thing... oh what is exactly is your point exactly??? That we should have sent them home to die in 2000? Or send them home to proabably die now?
It was just that both judgements were in their own way absurd (if not surreal) no need to get all uppity...
But if you must... following your logic then, are you saying we should grant refugee status to each and every Afghan citizen, whether hijakers or no? Because that's what you are saying, sin't it? That Taliban or no, they are by definition allowed to stay in the UK regardless of how many laws they broke to get here?
In any case, it was a juxtoposition wasn't it! I wouldn't have written about the hijakers (released on a technicality, for what it's worth) if justice wasn't busy demonstrating its own absurdity in THE FINAL QUOTE.
Geddit?!
Yeah I got that - the thing is that the Afghans did face justice in the country (the UK) in which they committed the crime - and it acquitted them, for whatever reaon.
But I take the juxtapositional point though one should hardly be surprised that our judiciary thinks it OK to ship our citizens to the States to face justice but not to ship our asylum-seekers back to the countries they sought asylum from - even if we are helping to run that country's inadequate administration.
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