After the tragic news of two asylum seekers that tried to take their lives on Friday at Luona’s asylum reception center in Espoo, Migrant Tales has learned of two suicide cases that occurred and weren’t reported by the media.
The first happened in December when an asylum seeker, believed to be an Iraqi Kurd, wanted to throw himself off the roof of Luona’s Robert Huberin tie reception center.
“The young asylum seeker was mentally unstable and suffering from war trauma,” a source told Migrant Tales. “Sometimes he’d wake up in the evening thinking that his pillow was a chopped off head.”
An employee working for Luona convinced the asylum seeker not to take his life.
“When I told the morning shift manager about what happened, he didn’t care one bit for the person that needed medical [psychiatric] attention,” the source continued. “The manager said that he didn’t care if the asylum seeker died.”
The second case took place in January. It involved a young Afghani man threw himself off the bridge above Kehä III located right across the Jumbo Shopping Center in Vantaa but was saved by a life net.
“The police and fire department arrived in time,” the source said. “Fortunately, he was saved.”
For many asylum seekers, Finland became a big disappointment. Too many didn’t find a country that showed compassion to them never mind helped relieve their suffering. While some reception centers do a good job by treating asylum seekers humanely, there are others like Luona that treat them in a shameful and humiliating manner.
Not only does the Luona management appear to turn a blind eye to such abuses but they are committed by some employees with Palestinian and Kurdish background.*
Even if the Finnish government and the Finnish Immigration Service have had a challenging time accommodating a record 32,500 asylum seekers that came to Finland in 2015, there are still a lot of mistakes that continue to be committed by companies such as Luona.
* Migrant Tales would like to stress, and has no intention to generalize that all people of a certain nationality are allegedly acting in such a way.