Welcome to Heaven... How About a Nice Cup of Tea? ; Special Investigation Last Week, Immigration Once Again Ignited a Blaze of Controversy. Here, the Mos's Special Correspondent Goes in Search of the Cold Facts Behind This Emotive Subject - and Reveals Why so Many Asylum Seekers Head for Britain

Summary

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An elegant man in his 50s with a passing resemblance to the actor David Suchet enters the room at the Refugee Council in Leeds. With his urbane manner and air of authority, he could easily be mistaken for the boss.

Instead, Said has come to tell me the story of how he once was a lecturer in educational psychology at Kabul University and a happy family man, but became an asylum seeker forced to pay a human trafficker to take him to safety.

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Extract

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Welcome to Heaven... How About a Nice Cup of Tea? ; Special Investigation Last Week, Immigration Once Again Ignited a Blaze of Controversy. Here, the Mos's Special Correspondent Goes in Search of the Cold Facts Behind This Emotive Subject - and Reveals Why so Many Asylum Seekers Head for Britain

One day, he returned from a trip to Herat to his home in Kabul and found his family had disappeared.

None of the neighbours could say what had happened. It was in 2001, when Afghanistan was in the iron grip of the Taliban.

Said had already been forced to send his 14-year-old son out of the country in 1996, fearing he would end up as a Taliban recruit. Now he didn't know if his wife, remaining son and two daughters were alive. He decided to flee to a place of safety and find out the truth about his family.

He was advised by friends to sell up and get out of Kabul fast. In early 2002, Said crossed the lawless border into Peshawar in Pakistan and, after initial enquiries, walked into the Pakistani headquarters of an international human trafficker.

To his customers he was known as 'the agent', but the trafficker's business was tak...

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