New York Times report death of a Pakistani in US custody

Saturday, April 4, 2009 at 9:48 pm

New York Times report death of a Pakistani in US custody NEW YORK: After extensive litigation by a civil rights body and several months of investigation by The New York Times, US authorities only recently acknowledged the death in an immigration custody of a detained Pakistani whose urgent pleas for medical attention went unheeded until it was too late, the newspaper reported.

Ahmad Tanveer, the 43?year?old Pakistani, died in a New Jersey jail on

September 9, 2005, when a fellow inmate, a Nigerian, wrote in imperfect English, describing his chest pains and calls for medical help.

“Death … need to be investigated,” he urged a local group that corresponded with foreigners held for deportation at the jail, the Monmouth County Correctional Institute in Freehold.

“We care very much because that can happen to anyone of us.”

Inquiries by the local group were rebuffed by jail officials, the Times said in a front page investigative report. Complaints forwarded to the Department of Homeland Security were logged, then forgotten.

And when pressure from Congress and the news media compelled Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to produce the first list of people who had died in their custody, Tanveer’s was not on it.

“Even now, most questions about Mr. Tanveer are unanswered, including just who he was and why he had been detained,” the Times said.

“The case underscores the secrecy and lack of legal accountability that continue to shield the system from independent oversight, despite years of escalating Congressional inquiries and new efforts by Obama administration appointees to promote transparency”, the report said.

“We still do not know, and we cannot know, if there are other deaths that have never been disclosed by ICE, or that ICE itself knows nothing about,” said Tom Jawetz, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which has been battling in court for months to obtain government records on all detention deaths, including the Tanveer’s case and those named on the first government list, obtained by the Times under the Freedom of Information Act and published last year.

“Not until March 20, in response to a new request by The Times under the Freedom of Information Act, did the agency release an internal e?mail message acknowledging that the death had been overlooked. It issued a corrected list that now includes him his first and last names transposed among 90 people who died in immigration custody between Oct. 7, 2003, and Feb. 7, 2009”.

“We believe we have accounted for every single detainee death,”

Kelly Nantel, a spokeswoman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said last week, adding that a death in March was promptly reported to Congress under a policy directive from Dora Schriro, the new administration’s special adviser on detention.

In Tanveer’s case, the Times said efforts to draw public scrutiny were exceptional, yet went nowhere. The scrawled note by the Nigerian inmate Nigerian who garbled the dead man’s name as “Ahmed Tender,” reached citizen activists at the New Jersey Civil Rights Defense Committee, who were unable to confirm it at that time.

Early this year, The Times called a spokeswoman for the Monmouth County Sheriff, who confirmed the death and gave the name as Tanver, later correcting the spelling to Tanveer.

About Tanveer’s body, the director of the funeral home, Coppola?Migliore in Corona, Queens, was cited as saying that Tanveer’s New York relatives had it flown to Pakistan for burial, using Pakistan International Airlines.

Also futile was a search for witnesses among fellow detainees, many since deported, the Times said. The Nigerian detainee who wrote the urgent letter, an ailing diabetic, was later released pending a deportation hearing.

New York Times report death of a Pakistani in US custody

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