ASYLUM seekers are threatening legal action against the Home Office in a bid to stop them being sent to Blackburn -- because they don't know where it is.
A group of 37 had been told they would have to move from their temporary accommodation in Liverpool to three towns across the North West, including Blackburn.
They were told where they would be sent just minutes before they were due to get on a bus.
Blackburn with Darwen Council had already made preparations for their arrival. But the bus did not show up because none of the asylum seekers were prepared to travel.
Today a director of an asylum support group said many of the asylum seekers were reluctant to move to Blackburn because they had never heard of it. The government's National Asylum Support Service decided to move the people, who include Kurds and Iraqis, after the high rise blocks of flats they had been living at in the Everton district of Liverpool were deemed unfit for human habitation.
They were shifted to temporary accommodation across Liverpool until NASS found them somewhere permanent to live, including homes in Blackburn.
More than 100 asylum seekers have already been placed in Blackburn. The asylum seekers in Everton went on hunger strike earlier this year in a bid to be moved out of the flats.
They refused to board the bus laid on by NASS because they are now seeking legal advice to see if their rights have been infringed by the decision to move them.
Malik Al-Nasir, a director of the Merseyside Refugee Support Network,said: "Liverpool may not be the best place on earth but at least people have heard of it and these people have tried to settle here.
"They will have been told 'You're going to Blackburn' and they won't have known where it is at all. They know nothing aboutthe place.
"After the first six months in the country, the asylum seekers can be allowed to work.
"Many of them have also struck up relationships, and to move to somewhere they haven't have heard of would be very upsetting for them. Life here has been hostile for them, but at least they know where they are here."
Some of the residents in Everton were sent to Glasgow last year at the same time as an asylum seeker was killed. Blackburn has also had several cases of asylum seekers being attacked, including one group in the Livesey area of Blackburn who had to be rehoused. Everton's Labour councillor Jane Corbett who has been working with the asylum seekers, said: "I am extremely angry that NASS has not responded to the plight of the asylum seekers who desperately want to remain in Liverpool."
A spokesman for the Home Office, which runs NASS, said: "We are still intending to disperse.
"But we will now have to look at the objections which the asylum seekers are raising."
Miranda Carruthers-Watts, assistant director of welfare rights at Blackburn with Darwen Council, said: "Dispersals take place as part of a planned programme but none occurred on this occasion.
"We were expecting six people, all of whom were Kurdish speakers.
"This means they would generally have come from either Turkey or Iraq."
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