Two brothers arrived in Birmingham seeking safety. Four months later one was dead

Mustafa Maolanzadeh is sitting in a small court room in Birmingham city centre. Wood panels line the walls and grey squares of industrial carpet sit under his feet. He’s nervous, but determined to be listened to. This opportunity was almost taken away from him.

It is Monday 29 September and the 25-year-old has just sworn in as a witness for the inquest into the death of his younger brother, Ismael. With one hand on the Quran, a man next to him translating his Kurdish-Sorani into English, Mustafa pledged to tell the truth about what happened on 10 December 2023. That’s the day he found his 19-year-old brother’s body in the room they shared at a Serco-run hotel for asylum seekers in Birmingham, a few months after the pair arrived in the UK from Iran. Mustafa is convinced the conditions there played a part in Ismael’s death.

But since Ismael’s suicide Mustafa has been fighting an uphill battle for his concerns to be heard. 

In 2024, Birmingham’s senior coroner, Louise Hunt, determined the particulars around Ismael’s death. She conducted an inquest in writing, relying on only witness statements provided by police and a Serco housing officer. This process, allowed since 2022 under rules intended to ease the immense pressure on the backlogged courts system, does away with the need for a public hearing. To go ahead, Hunt was required to get the agreement of any interested parties — a category that includes Mustafa.

But her communication was lost in translation. Court documents from a judicial review brought by Mustafa against Hunt’s boss, the area coroner for Birmingham and Solihull, outline the specifics. Hunt had voiced her intentions to a Serco housing officer who said they were acting on Mustafa’s behalf. The papers state that Hunt understood “informal translation” was being provided for Mustafa as she spoke with the Serco staff member over the telephone. The officer told her Mustafa was happy to go ahead, so she did. In her inquest report, Hunt determined that Ismael had died by suicide, following the breakdown of his relationship with his girlfriend. In her report, she did not mention his asylum status, or his living conditions.

When Mustafa heard this, he was astounded. He hadn’t given his consent for the inquest in writing. He claims that life inside the hotel for asylum seekers where the pair lived had taken its toll on Ismael’s mental health. “You spend your time, 24 hours, between four walls and there’s nothing you can do,” he told The Dispatch last May. “You don’t have money to go out. My brother was very, very active. He was always participating in protests [in Iran]. He had a lot of energy. But once he got here, it’s like all this thing has been taken away from him.”

Following the judicial review (supported by human rights organisation, Liberty), the coroners agreed to conduct a fresh inquest, in public and with Mustafa as a witness. He is determined to make Hunt understand what he passionately believes to be true: that Ismael was formerly a happy young man. and that a hostile asylum system was a key factor in his mental health decline.

‘We had a choice. Stay and be imprisoned or executed, or flee.’

When I meet Mustafa in mid-November, he is noticeably less animated than our first encounter. The intervening six months have had a subduing effect. I’ve asked him to come to The Dispatch office in the Jewellery Quarter; he’s caught the bus from Perry Barr, then walked through the city centre to get here. Lampposts are newly adorned with Christmas decorations, sparkling valiantly through the early winter gloom. For Mustafa, the glitter is a grim reminder of the period two years ago, when Ismael took his own life.

“It makes me think about that time,” Mustafa tells me, through an interpreter. His mouth twists unhappily behind a wispy beard. “I am thinking about it a lot at the moment.”

The months following the brothers’ arrival in Birmingham should have been a time of relative calm. Life at home in western Iran had grown increasingly difficult. Oppression against Kurdish communities was suffocating and the government was imprisoning and killing dissidents. Mustafa and Ismael regularly attended protests against discrimination against women, the killing of dissenters, and to call for the right to an education in their own language. Several of their friends had been thrown in jail. 

“We had a choice,” says Mustafa. “Either we stay there and be captured and imprisoned or executed by the authorities, or flee. And we decided to flee.”

Mustafa and Ismael’s journey was an arduous three-month trek along roads, through jungles, and across the sea. They shared lorry space with livestock defecating next to them, slept in thin jackets underneath forest canopies in the freezing cold, and grew dizzy in the back of a sweltering van alongside 30 other people, taking turns to inhale from one, small air hole. More than one of their travelling companions did not make it out alive. 

On 11 August 2023, after travelling from Iran, through Turkey and across Europe, their dinghy washed up on British shores. Mustafa doesn’t know the exact location. They were met by police who gave them towels and drove them to the Dover Immigration Removal Centre. From there, they were put on a coach to a hotel in Basingstoke, where officials attempted to transfer Ismael to Newcastle and Mustafa to another city, the name of which he can’t remember. Mustafa, the protective older brother, refused to be separated from Ismael. There was only one other option, they were told: sleep on the street.

“I grabbed Ismael’s hand and we left the hotel,” Mustafa remembers. At Basingstoke Railway Station, an attendant let them get on a random train without paying. The final stop was Birmingham New Street. They attempted to make a bed in a bus shelter.

After a couple of nights sleeping rough in the city centre, they happened upon a Kurdish man working at a takeaway shop who gave them a bite to eat.

“‘We have just arrived here. We have nothing. We have no money,” they told him. 

The man called the charity Migrant Help on their behalf and the brothers were eventually taken to a hotel. This became their home for the next four months while the Home Office decided what to do with them. 

At the inquest, a lot of time was spent trying to ascertain if the brothers had been offered access to a GP and mental health services. Mustafa claimed they were given a leaflet about healthcare but it was in English and they didn’t understand what the phrase ‘GP’ meant. Serco records show the pair were signed up with a doctor but Mustafa and Ismael had not asked to see one during their time there.

As asylum seekers without the right to work, the pair spent their days inside, occasionally going out for walks or to Kurdish-run barber shops and restaurants. But with very little money, there wasn’t a lot to do to fill the time. Sometimes, sitting on the floor of their shared bedroom and reclining against the radiator, they would be struck by how strange their situation was.

“We didn’t have a mobile phone, we didn’t have anything but sometimes we would go outside [for walks] and laugh together,” says Mustafa. “Sometimes we would come back and think about it. We said ‘OK, we’ve got nothing. What are we doing here?’ We would be sad for a second and then start laughing.” Birmingham didn’t make much of an impression. The brothers instead tried to keep spirits up by dreaming of the future. More than anything, they wanted decisions on their asylum claims so they could work. Back home, in their village, both brothers had enjoyed tinkering with cars — perhaps they could make a living in bodywork repairs.

As time went on, however, Ismael’s supply of resilience ran short. Mustafa noticed his once joyful brother was dogged by a persistent black mood. He would stay in their room for days at a time and struggled to find things to feel happy about. 

“It’s not going to be like that forever. It’s temporary’,” Mustafa would tell him, attempting to cheer him up. He knew Ismael had arguments with his girlfriend in Iran, whom he regularly communicated with via his recently acquired mobile phone. But they always fought, then made up again. He was sure the biggest contributor to Ismael’s low mood was the uncertainty of his future.

On a day after one such row, 10 December 2023, Ismael was lying in bed feeling sad. He had spent the entirety of the previous week in their room. Mustafa and a friend, another hotel resident, tried to convince him to go with them to the barbers but he declined. Ismael said he would meet them afterwards to get some food. He’d text Mustafa, he promised. But several hours later, Mustafa still hadn’t heard from his brother. He and the friend returned to the hotel to check on him. Mustafa opened the door to their room to see his younger brother’s body lying on the floor. The teenager had hanged himself from the window.

At the inquest, the coroner asked Mustafa what his reaction was. “I wanted to die,” Mustafa replied.

A fresh start — but a lonely one

When Mustafa addressed the coroner last month, his voice broke as he described his and Ismael’s life at home in their village in Iranian Kurdistan. He spoke of their parents, their three older sisters and their younger brother, and the horses they kept and loved to ride. Photos of Ismael were displayed on screens in the court room — Mustafa’s favourite showed his brother sitting proudly on a horse, rearing its front legs into the air. This is how he likes to remember him, not as the broken and lost boy he was in Birmingham.

But, unfortunately for Mustafa, the outcome of the second inquest was largely the same as the first one, except this time Hunt acknowledged Ismael’s asylum status. She found that he had not reported any mental illness or thoughts of suicide to Serco staff. Mustafa is disappointed by the verdict, but his overriding feeling is one of guilt. He’d always been Ismael’s shield, his protector. He feels as though he failed him when it mattered most.

Mustafa has now been granted refugee status. It’s a relief, especially because he can now travel and work. He has a job as a mechanic in a car garage and he lives with a friend in Perry Barr, although he wants to get a council flat. It is a fresh start of sorts, but a lonely one.

“Birmingham has good and bad,” he tells me. “I have lots of good memories [laughing] with my brother and those memories are making me sad.” But ultimately, the city is just a place to him, albeit one safer than the home he came from.

One of the more painful experiences he has had lately was seeing a Facebook post of a Birmingham Live story, a report of Ismael’s inquest. He shows me a screenshot on his phone. In the comments underneath the post are myriad laughing emojis, yawning faces, and comments like: “use this as an example to send to other migrants.” Birmingham Live has since restricted who can comment. Mustafa’s heart sank to see it.

He looks glum as he slides the phone back into his pocket. “I am saddened, in this day and age there are some people being happy, laughing about somebody losing their life,” he tells me. 

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