Surely one of the saddest stories to hit the news: an inquest has recorded an open verdict on the death of the brilliant Ethiopian athlete Dejere Kebede-Tulu. He fled to England from Ethiopia following his father’s murder, then endured three years of living on £53 a week because he wasn’t allowed to work in the UK. Through all this, he continued to train, helped out by philanthropic sports scientist Ceri Diss. Finally, he gained citizenship last year, and was tipped to win a medal for Britain at the 2008 Olympics. No sooner than his citizenship problems had been solved, he died in poverty in his flat in Holloway in June last year aged just 25, discovered only days afterward by a friend, by which time his body had decomposed too much to determine the cause of death.
The story is told movingly in today’s Telegraph, and also reported in The Independent, and last week’s Islington Gazette.
See also: Helen Bamber Foundation, which cares for victims of gross human rights violations.
