A VIETNAMESE student who completed an eight-month prison sentence for theft has been detained in police custody for the last 10 weeks because no one can find his passport to send him home.
Nguyen Van Duc, a former student at a Nicosia college, was sentenced to eight months’ imprisonment on charges of theft last January. When his prison term came to an end on August 3, he was released from the Central Prison in Nicosia only to be taken next door to the police detention centre, infamously known as Block 10. The centre has become synonymous with the lengthy and often illegal detention without trial of illegal migrants, who are caught in a legal no man’s land. Some wait years for the authorities to decide what to do with detainees who on most accounts have destroyed their travel documents and are not wanted back by their country of origin.
In Van Duc’s case, despite claiming his innocence, he is very willing to return to Vietnam after having served his sentence but finds himself stuck in limbo, with the authorities unable to locate his passport.
“I am innocent, which is why they let me go after eight months while my friends got two year sentences. The authorities let me out of the Central Prison in August but now they keep me in Block 10 indefinitely. I just want to go back to my country,” he told the Cyprus Mail.
Senior police officer Nicos Theodorou said Van Duc had been declared a “prohibited immigrant” after his release from prison under the Foreigners Law and would be deported to Vietnam as soon as his passport was found.
“There seems to be some confusion as to who actually had the passport. If correct procedure had been followed then the passport would be in our hands, but it seems the person in question initially told police he didn’t have it, then he said it was at his house but the police couldn’t find it and now he’s saying he gave it to the police months ago. But we don’t know who he gave it to so we can locate it. No one seems to have it,” said Theodorou, whose role is to liaise for the police with the Interior Ministry.
Asked why the authorities didn’t simply issue temporary travel documents so Van Duc could return to Vietnam, he replied: “That would be an option but they don’t have an embassy here so we would have to go abroad for that, which we might end up doing if we don’t find the passport.”
“This could take anywhere from a week, a month or even two months, it depends on whether we can find it,” he added.
