Sushi In A Barrel

The Daily Telegraph no longer seems to answer my e-mails; perhaps it was the blog titled 'The Daily Treasongraph' that did for me.

No matter.

This morning, Philip Johnston devotes a large portion of his 'Home Front' column to a perceived miscarriage of justice currently being effected upon a Japanese national named Hidehiro Iga.

Johnston describes Iga's case thus -

"When Mr Reid took over at the Home Office...he declared that the immigration department responsible was "not fit for purpose". Flexibility and delegated decision-making were no longer options. He ordered that all foreign prisoners must be properly considered for deportation, even if this meant they had to be detained after having finished their jail sentences.

This was bad news for Hidehiro Iga, 61, an osteopath and businessman who travelled by Eurostar to London from Paris on December 17 last year on what was meant to be a day trip.

Unfortunately for him, he did so carrying a false passport, though why is anybody's guess as he had a perfectly valid one that got him into France in the first place. His lawyer says Iga, who is divorced and of previously good character, is thought to have become tangled up with a cult and prevailed upon to do something illegal to get someone else into the UK.

They obviously did not know how easy that is. Typically, Iga was able to enter Britain unchallenged on his false passport. It was only when he was trying to go back to Paris that French immigration officers based at Waterloo noticed something was wrong and handed him over to British authorities.

Iga was shocked to be jailed for 16 months for what is a serious offence of "being in possession of a false instrument with intent to deceive". He was represented by Harry Grayson, a London solicitor, who believed his client would be automatically released halfway through his term, as everyone is nowadays unless they are jailed indefinitely. The judge did not recommend deportation."

Whether his sentence 'shocked' Iga or not is neither here nor there - as Dritan Musaraj could tell you, attempting to enter the UK on a false passport is equivalent in law to attempting to pervert the course of justice; and for a sentence as heavy as 16 months to have been handed down for a first offence of this kind prior to the outbreak of The Great Foreign Criminals Fiasco makes one wonder whether or not there might have been been aggravating factors at work in Iga's case. After all, he would appear to have been involved in a conspiracy.

Iga wants to go home, and the Home Office seems to be stopping him; Johnston's contention that "In any sane world, Iga would simply have been taken to the airport, put on the next flight to Tokyo and told not to come back" is therefore not only sound, but thoroughly laudable.

However, the column contains a tiny wee factual error which all devotees of foreign criminal stories will have spotted straight away.

Johnston writes that Iga is 'thought to be the only Japanese national detained in this country'.

One doesn't know who thinks that, because on March 13 a Japanese paedophile named Iasoa Yasuhara was sentenced to five years imprisonment at Newcastle Crown Court.

And one must thank both Philip Johnston and The Daily Telegraph for pointing out the case of conspirator and passport fraudster Hidehiro Iga - soon to be a new addition to The Black Museum.