The young Albanian, Leonard Farruku, who was found dead on the Bibby Stockholm ship in Great Britain, was discovered to have ended his life about 12 hours after the event, his roommate told The Guardian.
The asylum seeker was found dead in a shower cubicle on the ‘prison ship’, while his roommate Yusuf Deen Kargbo, 20, asked the Home Office to stop using it to accommodate those seeking refugee status.
Kargbo, a former Commonwealth Games competitor from Sierra Leone, told The Guardian that Farruk was a “good and kind man who always smiled and said hello”.
The 20-year-old said he and Farruk had shared a room for about a week and a half before his death, which is being investigated by the coroner and the Interior Ministry.
“Leonard didn’t speak much English and we both didn’t spend much time in our rooms during the day,” he said. “But he was friendly and showed me how to hang the towels in the shower room. Sometimes I would see him watching videos on his phone. I didn’t know about any mental health issues he might have had.”
Farruk’s sister Jola Dushku, 33, who lives in Lombardy, Italy, told The Guardian her brother had no known mental health problems before he boarded the ferry from the Home Office.
She also paid tribute to him. “Leonard was more than a brother to me and our sister. He was a very charming person, he was full of humor and above all he was very straightforward. He had many friends in Albania and maintained strong relations with them. He would never talk about anyone behind their back.”
His Home Office identity card shows he was only given permission to work a few days before his death, due to the fact that his job, thought to be in hospitality, was on the shortage occupations list.
Kargbo said the last time he saw him alive was when he went for his dinner in the ship’s dining room. When he returned to his room after dinner and wanted to use the toilet, he found the door closed and assumed that Farruk was using the bathroom, so he left the room and used another bathroom.
He then went to another part of the barge, where the broken Wi-Fi signal on board was known to be better, and made a long phone call of about an hour and a half to his seat. Afterwards, he returned to his room, climbed into the bed on top of the bed he shared with Farruk, and fell asleep.
He woke up early in the morning around 5.30 am and saw that Farruk’s bed was untouched.
He then went to the bathroom and again saw that the door was locked.
“I knocked on the door and kept saying, ‘Hello, hello,’ but I got no answer,” he said. He then raised the alarm with security staff on board.
“At first they didn’t take me seriously, but after I asked them again, they came and saw it. When they got no answer, they forced open the door and found Leonard unconscious.”
The friend was hurried out of the room. “I had a bad feeling about it. The police kept asking me a lot of questions and I was not allowed to go back to my room even to get my clothes or documents,” he said.
He said he was not offered any support from the Home Office to deal with the trauma he experienced.
“Things are very bad on the barge. The biggest fear among asylum seekers is that the Home Office will lift the barge from its mooring and we will wake up to find ourselves sailing to Rwanda. For this reason many people are afraid to sleep at night.”
A few days after Farruk’s death, the roommate was removed from the barge as a result of the intervention of the charity Care4Calais. He has now moved to a hotel in Cardiff.
