The MUSA family from Nigeria have had 5 children removed under totally false pretences, for over a year now with no credible factual evidence in support of the children being taken by so-called “care workers”.. The original allegation made was that the children were being used in child trafficking, a ridiculous accusation finally disproved 5 months later when the Musa’s demand for DNA tests for the Britsh government proved the allegation completely untrue and proving the children were in fact the Musas offspring. This allegation was then changed to other allegations which are also false and total fabrications,as Mr. Musa explains in part 1 of the 3-part video series below.
The eldest daughter taken in April 2010 has had her name changed,, and has not been seen for nearly 10 months by her parents despite them demanding to see her – a crime in itself. So much more is involved which needs to be exposed to show the full amount of appalling atrocities involved in this case. It is truly unvelievable how things have continued this far with the children still away from their parents. The children need to be back in the family home from whence they came, and steps taken so that this appalling series of crimes can never happen again.
Incidentally, Haringey council was involved in the notorious “Baby P” case recently where sadly the toddler died, to name just one unnecessary tragic event that has passed.
These 3 videos with interviews with the Musas hardly show what is involved regarding the case, but are a start:
CHRISTOPHER BOOKERS SUNDAY TELEGRAPH ARTICLES CONDENSED relating to the MUSA case {excerpts shown where applicable}
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www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/7870342/Forced-adoption-is-a-truly-dreadful-scandal.html 3 July 2010
My last case is so shocking that I will return to it in more detail at a later date. It centres on a London couple who, earlier this year, had their six children seized by social workers on what appears to be flimsy hearsay evidence (I have seen the court papers). The mother was pregnant again. Last month, after the boy was born, three social workers and five policemen entered the hospital ward where she was breastfeeding at 3am, wresting the baby from her by force. They then discovered that they had nowhere to keep him. The boy was put into intensive care, where his mother was taken to breastfeed him for four days, until she was fit to leave the hospital. She saw her baby for the last time two weeks ago. I will return to this story when I have had some explanation from the council responsible.
Two weeks ago I recounted four examples of what I described as one of the greatest scandals in Britain today – the seizing of children by social workers from loving families, on what appears to be the flimsiest and most questionable grounds. The children may then be handed on to foster carers, who can receive up to £400 a week for each child, or are put out for adoption, in a way which too often leads to intense distress for both the parents and the children involved.
One case I referred to concerns a north London couple whose five children were seized in April by social workers from Haringey council and sent into foster care. The mother was then pregnant, and her baby was born last month. Shortly afterwards, according to her account, nine police officers and social workers burst into her hospital room at 3am and, as she lay breastfeeding, wrested her baby from her arms with considerable force. Discovering they had nowhere to put the baby, the authorities took it to another part of the hospital, where the mother was escorted four times a day to feed her child, until she was discharged four days later.
Having talked at length to the mother, I found this story so shocking that I put a series of questions to the council, to get their side of the story. The response of Haringey (which, since the national furore over its failure to prevent the battering to death of Baby P, has been somewhat sensitive on these issues) was to ask the High Court to rule that I should not be allowed to write about the case at all. In the end, the court did not go that far, but The Sunday Telegraph was reminded of the comprehensive restrictions on reporting such stories.
After spending several hours with the parents, looking at their neat home, the little beds where their children used to sleep and the cot prepared for the baby, I came away more convinced than ever that something was seriously amiss. I found the wife impressive in her detailed account of the events, clearly a devoted mother who feels herself and her children to have been the victims of an extraordinary error – the nature of which, alas, I cannot reveal.
This week, two days have been set aside for the mother to put her case to a judge. Despite the tragedy that has torn their family apart, the parents have never previously had an opportunity to challenge Haringey council’s version of the story. I only hope the court takes particular care to check out the evidence put before it, and that in due course I can fully report a case that sheds a revealing light on a system supposedly devised to protect the interests of the children but which too often seems to result in the very opposite.
Also this week, the fate of another family hangs on another court hearing. This is the story of a couple who last January were rejoicing at the birth of their first child. Some weeks later, concerned that the baby’s arm seemed floppy, they took it back to the hospital to seek medical advice. An X-ray confirmed a minor fracture. This proved to be the start of a nightmare, which led to them being arrested, handcuffed and driven off separately to a police station, where the mother was held for nine hours without food. The father was imprisoned overnight.
It emerged that the doctor they saw had reported her suspicion about the child’s fracture to Coventry social workers. The couple were put on police bail, ordering them to surrender their passports, forbidding them to be unsupervised in the presence of anyone under 16, and only allowing them to sleep in one of two named houses (the other being the father’s family home). But because no charges had been brought, the social workers allowed the baby into the care of its Irish grandmother, a respected primary school headmistress. To avoid the baby being seized, she took it to her family home in Dublin, where it has been supported by a band of relatives.
Determined not to be thwarted, Coventry’s social workers then asked the Irish courts to rule – in a case to be heard this week – that the baby must be sent back to them in England. The hospital doctor has meanwhile contacted the Irish medical authorities demanding that in no way must they carry out specific medical tests on the baby which might account for its injury.
On Thursday I spoke again with the mother, who reported that her own bail had been lifted. She was therefore about to join her baby in Ireland. But the child’s father has been told that he may face charges for harming his son, a possibility they find incredible. This will be reported to the Irish court, prompting the fear that the child may be taken from his mother and grandmother, neither of them under any suspicion, and deported to England to be placed in foster care.
In the House of Commons last week I met the one politician who has done more than any other – as this kind of story grows disturbingly frequent – to expose what is going on. John Hemming, the Lib Dem MP for Yardley, Birmingham, not only set up the Justice for Families website, which contains details of many similar cases, but recently assembled an official all-party group of concerned MPs to campaign for the radical overhaul of a system which seems so horribly off the rails, and too often to be betraying the very principles it was intended to uphold.
Not the least startling feature of this system is the secrecy with which it has managed to hide away from the world almost all it gets up to. As is confirmed by Ian Josephs, a remarkable businessman who runs the Forced Adoption website and has helped hundreds of families in similar plight, one of its most glaring flaws is the extent to which aggrieved parents are deprived of any right to put their case, not just to the courts but to anyone who might be able to help them.
It is a system hermetically sealed off, in which the fate of parents and children can be decided by an incestuously closed community of social workers, police, lawyers, doctors and other professional “experts”, who all too often seem to work together in an alliance which is ruthlessly oblivious to the interests of the families who fall into its clutches. Again and again I have heard of the misery of children torn from their distraught parents, forced to live unhappily in the hands of inadequate foster carers, and whose only wish is to be returned to those they know and love.
The more I learn about this scandal, the more I understand why, in April, an Appeal Court judge, Lord Aikens, savaged the actions of Devon county council social workers in a forced adoption case as having been “more like Stalin’s Russia or Mao’s China than the west of England”. The council’s lawyers were told to read a judgment by Lord Justice Wall, now head of the High Court’s Family Division, which condemned Greenwich social workers as “enthusiastic removers of children”.
It is high time the veils of secrecy were ripped from this national outrage; that politicians intervened to call the system to order; and that the press was free to bring properly to light family tragedies such as those I have only been allowed to hint at above.
They appear to have no evidence for these charges other than the hearsay surmising of a single “witness”. I gather that the social workers had reluctantly agreed to commission DNA testing of parents and children, to establish whether they were all from the same father. But even now, I am told, the social workers are refusing to disclose the test results.
The mother, accompanied to this surreal interrogation by a nun who had known her for years, insisted that she had only slept with one man in her life, her husband, the father of her children. She went on to ask one of the social workers how many men she had slept with. The reply was that this was a private matter.
Perhaps we are not very far here from those extraordinary cases some 20 years ago when children were torn away from their families wholesale because social workers had concocted a fantasy that they were being abused in weird satanic rituals (a story I told in my book Scared To Death).
It is vitally important that when this case again comes before the courts, the judge should put the council’s supposed evidence to very careful test.
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www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/8165143/Forced-adoptions-get-no-sympathy-from-the-ministry.html 27 Nov 2010 Last week I listened for an hour to a sobbing mother describing how she recently lost the six-year-old daughter who is the centre of her life. Her fatal mistake was to ask social workers for advice when she was being troubled by “harassment” from the child’s father, from whom she parted some years ago. Within days, although it was never suggested that she had harmed her daughter in any way, she found herself facing a “case conference” of 20 people at the local council offices, the conclusion of which was that her child must be placed in foster care.
The solicitor she was given by the social workers refused to oppose the care order. At a “contact” session, when she and her bewildered daughter emotionally expressed their love for each other, the interview was halted. She has not been allowed to see her child again.
Having followed dozens of such cases in recent months, which suggest that something has gone horribly wrong with our child protection system, I was recently invited for an off-the-record ministerial discussion about what I have been reporting. But far from recognising that anything might be astray, the official line, it seems, is that the horrifying cases I have covered represent only an untypical minority of the total – “less than 10 per cent”. In general, the system is working fine.
This line seems to be confirmed by the latest guidance issued to local authorities by the Children’s Minister, Tim Loughton, who says that too many councils are failing to ensure that enough children are being adopted, and that the backsliders must speed up their flow of adoptions. No question as to whether social workers might be snatching too many of the wrong children in the first place – or why the courts seem so eager to support them that, of around 8,000 applications made each year for care orders, only one in 400 is refused.
I shall give just one disturbing instance of the latest developments in a case I have been following for months. Like many others, this came to me through the Forced Adoption website, run by former councillor Ian Josephs. It involves a married couple whose five older children were seized earlier this year, subsequent to which their latest baby was torn from its mother’s arms only hours after it was born.
The bizarre story originally stated by the social workers to justify their ruthless intervention in this family’s life seems to have collapsed. At a recent court hearing, I am told, the judge seemed disposed to reunite the family as soon as possible. The baby was returned to her parents later that day. But the council asked for 21 days’ stay of execution before returning the five older children, three of whom the parents had not been allowed to see for weeks. The judge apparently agreed but insisted that an independent social worker should interview the children.
The independent social worker eventually managed to interview four of the children, apparently reporting that they all wished to be allowed to go home to their parents. But the court refused to give the parents a copy of the judge’s ruling, and on Friday they were summoned back to hear from him that he had now seemingly changed his mind and that the children did not wish to come home after all. According to the parents, they were not allowed to question the evidence on which he based his new ruling, although they were told they could appeal.
What on earth is going on here? Even from the little I am permitted to report of this case, it seems evident that something seriously odd is afoot.
But this is merely one of far too many cases where families are being heartlessly torn apart, often without the parents even being allowed to question the evidence or to speak for themselves. To hear such horror stories being dismissed as representing “less than 10 per cent” of all the cases where children are seized is simply not good enough. Each is shocking enough in its own right. But when every week brings news of a dozen more, this only confirms that we indeed have a national scandal on our hands.
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www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/8181575/Child-protection-how-a-cruel-council-plays-its-cat-and-mouse-game.html 4 12 2010
Last Tuesday I dined in a smart Knightsbridge restaurant with Ian Josephs, who runs the Forced Adoption website, his wife, a mother whom I cannot name and her delightful five-month-old baby, who sat in a high chair perfectly behaved throughout. This was the baby who, shortly after she was born in June, was torn from her mother’s arms in hospital at 3am by six policemen and three social workers. Two months earlier, social workers had also snatched the mother’s five older children, to put them in foster care, costing taxpayers more than £2,000 a week.
On Tuesday afternoon, the mother had been unexpectedly told that she could have contact with two of her children, miles from north London where she lives. Yet again, when she arrived at the contact centre, she was told that the children were not coming, although apparently they long to see her. On returning to the station with her baby, given back to her by the court six weeks ago, she found that all trains had been cancelled because of the snow, forcing her to return to London by taxi at a cost of £50.
This was yet another instalment of a cat and mouse game the council has been playing with the parents for months, telling them they can see their children, only for them frequently to hear, after their long journey, that some or all of the children were not available after all. (It happened again last Friday.)
Months ago the court ordered that the children should be brought back into London, nearer their home. Meanwhile, the council should give the parents a travel voucher, worth more than £30 a time, for their journey. Only once did the council provide a voucher, which the parents discovered on the return journey was one-way only, costing them £100 in penalties.
Since then the court order has been ignored and the parents have had to pay up to £150 a week to see their children, only to be told on arrival that the agreed contact has been cancelled.Meanwhile, the case used to justify the seizing of the children has been collapsing in all directions, although the parents have not once been allowed to challenge the extraordinary statements made about them. Not until next year, 10 months after this family was ruthlessly broken up, will there be a final hearing to decide whether this utterly heartless farce can at last be brought to an end. If and when the facts about this barely credible story can be reported, it will be worthy of the front page.
Why cannot the mother be told this before she leaves home? Last week, the fostering agency Capstone Vision claimed that the fault for this outrageous behaviour lies with the council social workers, who seem determined to punish the mother for the fact that all their original excuses for seizing the children have been exposed as malicious fictions
How strikingly this contrasts with the suffering inflicted on those parents whose five children, as reported here more than once, were snatched from them last April by London social workers, on suspicions which have since, it appears, turned out to be malicious fabrications.
A council whistleblower has said that, at a recent case conference, the social workers admitted that maybe they had made a mistake, and that the mother they had falsely accused was in fact devoted and blameless. But apparently, because of “press interest” in the case, the officials agreed that the council could not afford the very damaging publicity which might follow if the unhappy children were reunited with their parents. It was therefore vital that the council should continue to justify its actions.
The case comes up again in court very soon. In the name of this family’s human rights, it must be hoped that the judge examines the evidence very carefully indeed.
One of the most disturbing features of this system, which protects itself behind a wall of secrecy, is how far it goes to ensure that aggrieved parents are represented only by lawyers who are themselves accomplices of the system. Again and again parents are bemused to find that the lawyers they were advised to use seem unwilling to challenge the case being made against them, however spurious.
Of all the cases I have followed, none is more bizarre than that of a couple whose six children were snatched by social workers last year on evidence which seemed at best highly questionable and was at worst an absurd fiction. The mother was advised to use a solicitor, on legal aid, who she felt was so much on the other side that she discharged him. Just before Christmas, when the council’s case seemed to be falling apart, I tracked down one of the very rare solicitors who has a reputation for fighting the system. His firm applied to the Legal Services Commission for transfer of the legal aid, and when the LSC seemed to be delaying its response, I paid £2,000 from my own pocket to enable the firm to start work.
The local authority learned, it seemed before anyone else, that the LSC would not allow the transfer from the solicitor who had been discharged – and the head of the council’s legal department then sent the mother a list of other solicitors who would be able to take her case on legal aid. By the time the solicitor to whom I had given £2,000 heard that he had been turned down, he was able to present me with a bill which, including VAT, came to exactly £2,000.
By now another solicitor had appeared, who seemed keen to take on the case for a reduced fee. Ian Josephs, who runs the Forced Adoption website, advanced £3,500 towards her fees, on an understanding that she could take the case through to its final hearing for a total of £5,000. Three days before they were due in court, this solicitor too – after a long conversation with one of the array of lawyers appearing, at huge public expense, for the other side – said she was unable to continue working on the case. She has not, so far, offered to return any of the money.
The mother now faces, without legal representation, a final hearing which could result in her losing her children forever. They live, unhappily, in separate foster homes, at a cost to the taxpayer of well over £100,000 a year. She and her husband came to this country a decade ago, full of hope: now she feels utterly betrayed by a system which seems ruthlessly bent on destroying her family. Her only wish is to escape this incomprehensible nightmare and return with her husband to their native country. But to do so, they would have to abandon any hope of seeing their beloved children again.
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It is understood Mr. Booker has been restrained in certain ways from reporting again on certain aspects of this case
If any peruqued paedophile in a British court wants to wave an injunction at me, I can only say “Bring it on baby. I live in a separate country”, although I wouldn’t be surprised if we haven’t sold our sovereignty in exchange for a financiasl handout. CP.
