The deportees from Germany landed in the Afghan capital, Kabul, on February 9. The men departed the German city Munich earlier that day.
According to the news agency AFP, the Bavarian regional office for Asylum and Refugees said on February 10 that the 26 men had landed in Afghanistan on February 9.
12 of the men were returned from Bavaria. The majority of the deportees, according to German authorities, were convicted criminals. Two of the men had committed serval serious crimes, including sexual abuse of children and young people, and had been sentenced to a hefty sentence in prison.
According to AFP, the other ten men who returned from Bavaria had committed other serious crimes.
Meanwhile, the other 14 Afghan nationals were put on the flight from a list of other German states, including Baden-Wurttemberg, Brandenburg, the city state of Hamburg, Hessen, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, North Rhine Westphalia, Rheinland Palitinate, Schlweswig-Holstein, Saarland and Saxony.
The other German states refrained from making any statement on the identity of those they had placed on the flight or the reasons for being included in the deportation flight.
Criticism from Pro Asyl
The pro-migrant group Pro-Asyl criticized the authorities after they deported the men to Afghanistan. They pointed out that the country’s security situation was so unstable that it should not be possible to return nationals there. They called the security situation a catastrophe, stating that parts of the country were still de facto controlled by the Taliban and other armed and extremist groups.
Afghanistan is also currently suffering from a high incidence of coronavirus cases in addition to terrorism, according to Pro-Asyl. In a press release published on February 9, the group said that both the Robert Koch Institute in Germany and the German Foreign Office had declared Afghanistan a high-risk area regarding COVID-19 and that the country was being hit hard and did not have any working health system network to cope with the pandemic.
Pro-Asyl added that four out of ten people are going hungry in Afghanistan and that malnutrition would also make it more difficult for people to fight off the coronavirus. The organization said that the number of now starving people had doubled since 2020, from 9.4 million to 18.4 million in 2021.
#StopDeportation
Pro-Asyl joined over 95 other groups worldwide who are campaigning to stop deportations under the Twitter hashtag #AfghanistanNotSafe and #StopDeportation.
The group claimed that one of the men scheduled to be on board the flight was just 9 years of age when he came to Germany. The 20-year-old living in North-Rhine Westphalia has never been to Afghanistan, and they said that he has no relatives there.
A spokesperson for the Left party, Ulla Jelpke, also posted her views about the deportee known as Hasib; she stated he was 22 years old. In her Twitter post, she said that if the Bavarian authorities have “a tiny bit of humanity in them, they will stop the deportation immediately.”