Man 'escaped UK wearing a veil'

Mustaf Jamma and how he may have looked in a niqab

In what looks set to increase the ‘veil debate’, a man is reported to have ‘slipped through customs’ whilst dressed in a niqab. Mustaf Jamma, a suspect wanted in connection with the murder of police officer Sharon Beshenivsky, is said to have evaded authorities and returned to his native Somalia last December [BBC]. The Home Office has said the claims, made in several newspapers, were unlikely to be true, and that immigration officers had powers to make checks. The reports claim that Mr Jamma had used his sister’s passport in order to pass through airport security. Immigration Minister Liam Byrne told BBC Radio 4’s World at One that it was “standard practice" for immigration officers to ask woman to lift their veils. But on a recent return from China, tvnewswatch has observed a fully veiled woman enter the UK without such checks. This was at the height of the ‘veil debate’ which had dominated the UK news media in October of this year.