McAliskey to Fight Extradition

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McAliskey to Fight Extradition

October 25, 2007

By Barry McCaffrey

FORMER civil rights campaigner Bernadette McAliskey has told a Belfast court that her daughter will never accept being extradited to Germany because of the trauma she suffered during previous attempts to extradite her against her will.

On Tuesday McAliskey gave evidence at a Belfast hearing to decide whether her daughter Roisin should be extradited to Germany to face questioning in connection with an IRA bomb attack on a British Army barracks in Osnabruck in 1996.

Roisin McAliskey was originally arrested in connection with the charges in 1998 and held in jail in Britain for more than a year while attempts were made to extradite her to Germany. She has always denied involvement in the attack.

Her imprisonment received international attention after she was forced to give birth to a baby girl while in custody.

In 2000 then British Home Secretary Jack Straw abandoned the extradition case, ruling that the 35-year-old had no case to answer.

However, Roisin McAliskey was unexpectedly re-arrested in May this year and a new attempt was made to extradite her to Germany.

This week Bernadette McAliskey revealed that her daughter had suffered severe post traumatic stress as a result of being held in a high security prison during the last attempt to extradite her to Germany.

“My daughter will never walk up the steps of a plane to go to Germany, ever, ever,” she said.

“If she is forcibly taken there she will not cooperate. She will roll up in a ball and die, and I can’t stop her doing that.”

Explaining how her daughter had suffered from post traumatic stress ever since she witnessed both her parents being shot in a Loyalist gun attack in 1981, when she was just nine years of age, she said, “She was the eldest of the three children and suffered the most traumatic effect.

“She had an over-riding fear they would come back. She kept having panic attacks and often went to bed with her clothes on, maybe out of fear she should have to get up quickly.

“I don’t think I have been able to have a rational conversation with my daughter since then.”

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