Nigerian man sues Canadian govt

A 47-year-old Nigerian identified as Olajide Ogunye who was arrested and detained in what later turned out a case of mistaken identity has filed a lawsuit against the Canadian government.

He was said to have been mistaken for a refugee who illegally enter the country.

Ogunye (now a Canadian citizen) has reportedly slammed the Canadian with a lawsuit and is claiming the sum of C$10m ($760,000, £571,000) as damages for his illegal detention.

Reports say Ogunye woke up on the morning of June 1, 2016 to find his home in Toronto surrounded by Canada Border Service agents who arrested and later detained him.

“It took me five minutes just to get to my car,” he told the BBC.

Before he could drive off, an agent presented him with a warrant for the name Oluwafemi Kayode Johnson, a failed refugee claimant who had been deported from Canada in the 1990s whom the immigration authorities believed had illegally returned to the country.

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“That is not me,” he told them. He showed them several forms of ID, including his Canadian citizenship documents and a provincial health card. The agents told him they would “sort this out”, and drove him to their office where they fingerprinted him.

There, they said his fingerprints matched Johnson’s and they booked him into Maplehurst Correctional Complex, a maximum-security prison for dangerous offenders.

“I wasn’t expecting something like that to me as a Canadian citizen,” Ogunye says.

For the next 248 days, Ogunye would be incarcerated – first in Maplehurst and then in Central East Correctional Centre, another maximum-security prison – while CBSA investigated his case.

Now that he is a free man, Ogunye is suing the government for C$10m for wrongful arrest and negligent investigation.

 

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