(RightWing.org) – A British immigration court is trying to unravel the mystery of why an Afghan national accused of spying for Russia was allowed onto one of the last evacuation flights out of Kabul before the city fell to the Taliban in 2021. The man, known only by a codename, is trying to get permission to stay in the UK. The country’s security services want him expelled — again.
In 2000, an Afghan man, identified only by the name C2, arrived in the UK and claimed asylum. He said he’d fled from his country to escape the Taliban, who controlled most of it at the time and was given permission to stay in Britain. He then went on to work as an interpreter for the police, the courts, and the Home Office, before getting a sensitive job at GCHQ, the British equivalent of the National Security Agency.
Then, in 2019, the Security Service (popularly known as MI5) discovered that, in fact, he’d fled Afghanistan in 1994 — and gone to Russia, where he’d lived for six years and even married a Russian woman. Security officers identified him as an agent for Russian military intelligence, the notorious GRU. His British citizenship was revoked and he was deported back to Afghanistan.
When President Biden pulled US forces out of Afghanistan in 2021 and collapsed the international alliance that had supported the country’s government for 20 years, C2 somehow managed to get himself onto an evacuation flight back to the UK. When the plane landed in Britain he was immediately arrested, as the Security Service warned he was a risk to the country. Now he’s trying to have his 2019 deportation reversed.
C2 admits that he lied at his original asylum hearing and has also confessed to having met Russian intelligence officers, but denies spying for Putin’s regime. He’s trying to persuade the Special Immigration Appeals Commission that he’s loyal to the UK — but British spy catchers are adamant that he’s a Russian spy, and needs to be removed.
Unfortunately, the chaos that erupted when Biden pulled out of Afghanistan without even telling our allies let him sneak back into the West in the confusion, and now liberal lawyers are fighting to let him stay.
Copyright 2024, RightWing.org