A failed asylum seeker has been jailed after committing a “frenzied and calculated” knife attack on a woman in a bid to prevent her deportation from Britain.
Awa Zongo, 29, poured a pan of boiling hot water over her housemate and stabbed her 30 times in an “unprovoked” assault in December last year, just two days before her deportation from Britain was due.
Manchester Crown Court heard that the defendant kept shouting “I’m not going back” as she launched the almost deadly attack on Asam Panahandeh at their home in Wigan, with doctors describing as “miraculous” the fact that the victim survived.
Zongo, who arrived in Britain from Burkina Faso in January 2019, sought entry to the nation as a visitor but was refused and placed in an immigration detention centre, according to the Manchester Evening News.
It reports that she was due to be removed from the country two days later but was taken off her deportation flight after becoming “uncooperative and unmanageable” and allowed to seek asylum and given accommodation at British taxpayers’ expense.
