CV NEWS FEED // An 84-year-old Iraqi Christian who waited seven years to have his asylum request granted has died while aboard his repatriation flight from Sweden.
Chaldean Christian Hanna Saka passed away on board his return to Baghdad after “managers of the immigration center in Stockholm rejected him with immediate deportation measures,” according to a recent AsiaNews report.
Saka’s brother reported the deceased to have arrived at the airport in a “worsening” condition, due to preexisting “heart disease and health problems in his lower limbs.”
Flight attendants and medical professionals on board attempted to provide urgent care to Saka, but were unable to rectify the situation. “His mental and physical health [had] deteriorated due to the stress following the rejection of his asylum application and the subsequent deportation order,” the report stated.
The Turkish Airlines plane then made an emergency landing in Warsaw, Poland, where authorities organized an autopsy to determine cause of death, and the final expatriation of Saka’s remains through the Baghdad embassy in Warsaw.
The situation for Christians in Iraq, a group “already on the margins,” has become increasingly “fragile,” AsiaNews stated: “the subject of kidnappings [and] killings that began in 2002 with the US invasion and culminated in the years of domination of the Islamic State (ISIS).”
Over 100 Christian families in the past few weeks alone have fled, the report concluded.
