Where is Favour Musa?

(LONDON) -

A family torn apart

On the 8 April 2010, 8 policemen let themselves in by key to the Musa family home in Haringey North London and removed the Musa's 5 children without any notice or prearrangement. The children were removed on what later were found to be untrue allegations made by certain people at Haringey council.

All allegations have been disproven, the allegations ranging from the children not being the Musas offspring and were being trafficked, to the children being beaten, etc.

Regarding the child trafficking allegation that the children were not the Musas offspring and they were in fact part of a child trafficking network DNA tests proved that the children were indeed the Musas, and the children were in no way being trafficked in any shape or form.

After this allegation was disproved other equally false allegations were made to keep the children from returning to their once happy home.

One such allegation that was made was that Gloria Musa was an active sex worker - a prostitute - who plied her trade in front of her church congregation and also in front of her children.

She is, in fact, an ordained bishop in the Evangelical Church of Africa and is not and has never been what this allegation alleges. This ridiculous allegation was made with no evidence of any kind to substantiate it yet the court believed this nonsense, along with other unsubstantiated allegations such as the children were beaten by the parents, even though medical examinations made when the council took the children showed no sign of anything to back their allegation.

Even though the allegations were proven groundless never was it mentioned that the children were to be returned to their parents as they should have been, of course. Quite the opposite in fact took place in that a 6th child was removed from the Musa parents, the hitherto unborn baby at the time of the April 8 2010 child removals Queen Elizabeth, who was removed on highly questionable evidence.

During the time the children were removed the eldest, now 11 year old Favour Musa, complained of being "inappropriatly touched" - sexually molested in other words - by the teenage habitee of the foster home she was placed in.

Ever since this child complained of her harassment, over 18 months ago, she has not been seen by any family member or the Nigerian High Commission - it is not known whether she is alive or dead, is even in this country and the council refuse to relate anything about the child when the parents enquire after her. She has simply vanished.

There is a £1000 reward been offered by an anonymous donor for her giving her testimony on video. They have also changed her name to "Lizzie". This article on "Parent Alienation Syndrome" shows how changing a child's name,location and lifestyle can turn her away from her loving parents and all she knew before: http://www.coeffic.demon.co.uk/pas.htm - .

Although commonly used in divorce cases it can of course be used to alienate parents after the child is moved into a foster home.

Recently on the 28th June 2011 the Musas took their baby to St. Thomas's hospital, London as they thought she seemed to have a fever - a temperature. This was enough for Haringey council to arrange for the police to remove the baby, claiming it had been administered hard drugs, even though tests taken by medical staff at the hospital at the time proved negative for all drugs in not only the baby but also in both parents.

Nevertheless an Emergency Protection Order {EPO} was placed on the baby immediately and she has been removed from the Musa family, even though the reasons for the baby's removal are totally fictional. At a court hearng on the 7th July the judge, who happened to be the original judge who ordered the removal of the other 5 children, believing the Haringey council's allegations, confirmed he would be issuing an Interim Care Order {ICO} on the newly taken baby, thus effectively removing her from the parents care, when a 2 week period was up.

This he duly did, and the baby Elizabeth has not now been seen since 28th June, the date of her removal. For no contact visits to be allowed is totally illegal, against British law, and against the "Childrens Act" and the parents and baby's Human Rights.

The court case for this removal is still current. {update 13 Dec. 2011: After a 6 day fact-finding hearing at the Royal Courts of Justice with Sir Nicholas Wall presiding it was deemed, by the "balance of probabilities" that the baby was given drugs which very nearly led to its death. This was assumed after much evidence was given by hospital staff and others. There should be an honest investigation into this evidence and I say this as a Mckenzie friend {for the defendants} who was there at the time for 4 days of this hearing}.

The Haringey Council's actions against the Musa
family are highly suspect and gaining attention.

The allegation by the council, in the early stages of this case, that Gloria Musa was given opium by her stepfather whilst in the UK as a teenager is completely untrue. Gloria Musa has no stepfather, has never taken opium at any time, and was not in the UK as a teenager. This is just one totally false allegation fabricated by the council and used in the removal of the Musa children.

Many other irregularities and anomalies exist in this outrageous case, from outright witness intimidation at least 5 people I am familiar with to police conducting raids with no warrant or legal documentation and without necessary witnesses required by British law.

The court orders concerning contact visits with the children have not been adhered to by the agency responsible for them on scores of occasions, and nothing is ever done about this, causing much unnecessary grief, worry and even financial hardship to this family who seemed to have been targeted by Haringey council and those connected to it.

All contact visits with the children have now stopped which is against the court orders for the family, against basic Human Rights and British law, and against the so-called "Childrens Act" touted by the government.

Supporters have written hundreds of emails and many letters sent by postal recorded delivery to MPs and other so-called "authority figures" {such as police and a Chief Constable} all of which have been totally ignored, even when trying to inform them of a 9 year old girl {at the time} being sexually molested.

The Musa parents were remanded in prison on the 31 November and remain there awaiting trial, which begins on 1 February. The cover-up is extreme in this case, with the usual unacceptable court injunctions on the reporting of this shocking case in place. What has gone on is disgraceful.

These are the basic facts of this outrageous case but many more crimes and irregularities exist. This is a true sworn statement and any further details can be given on request.

Sunday Telegraph reporter Christopher Booker's articles about the Musa family ordeal at the hands of Haringey council:

The social workers of Haringey are notorious for having failed to prevent the deaths of Baby P and Victoria Climbié. But in their zeal to avoid any repetition of these tragedies, they are now at the forefront of those councils which have pushed the number of children taken into care to an all-time high.

In all the cases I have been following where children have been taken from their families for what seem like dubious reasons, no single instance has been more disturbing than the plight of a 10-year-old girl seized by Haringey last year, who seems in the past 10 months to have vanished off the radar.

“Girl X”, as I shall call her, was taken into care on the basis of three allegations.

One turned out to be so laughably erroneous that it was soon dropped; a second was likewise dropped when medical tests completely disproved the council’ s claims. The third, highly questionable, has still not been put to any evidential test.

The last time Girl X was seen by her mother was at a supervised contact session last August. Having complained of sexual abuse by her foster carer’s 19-year-old son, she asked to be given, as a birthday present, a journal with a lock in which she could record her “secret thoughts”.

Since that day she has not been seen by her parents or, since the autumn, by her siblings, who are also in care.

It seems she has since been interviewed by three people – an independent social worker, an independent psychiatrist and her guardian, all of whom reported that she wished to see and be reunited with her mother.

No one representing the family has been allowed to see her, including the girl’s grandparents, who came from abroad specifically to visit her. Her parents have been forbidden to telephone her or even send a Christmas card. Her whereabouts are a mystery. When I put questions about her to Haringey last year, the council’s only response was to ask for a court order forbidding me to refer to the case at all. (It was not granted.)

What makes all this particularly disturbing is that, in several respects, it seems to defy the Children Act, which insists that councils must do all they can to encourage contact between children taken into care and their parents, who continue to share parental responsibility until a child is adopted. “The responsible authority,” says the Act, “has a duty to endeavour to promote contact” with the parents and “any relative, friend or other person connected to the child”. In particular, parents must be allowed to see medical or school reports relating to their child. The law also insists that, if children are old enough, they should be allowed to appear in court to express their wishes. None of these things has happened.

Why – when even Baby P’s mother was last year allowed out of prison to enjoy supervised contact with her surviving children – has Girl X been shut away as a silent prisoner, seemingly denied her rights? What has happened to Girl X?

My last case is so shocking that I will return to it in more detail at a later date. It centres on a London couple who, earlier this year, had their six children seized by social workers on what appears to be flimsy hearsay evidence (I have seen the court papers). The mother was pregnant again. Last month, after the boy was born, three social workers and five policemen entered the hospital ward where she was breastfeeding at 3am, wresting the baby from her by force. They then discovered that they had nowhere to keep him. The boy was put into intensive care, where his mother was taken to breastfeed him for four days, until she was fit to leave the hospital. She saw her baby for the last time two weeks ago. I will return to this story when I have had some explanation from the council responsible.

I have never, in all my years as a journalist, felt so frustrated as I do over two deeply disturbing stories of apparent injustice that cry out to be reported but which, for legal reasons, I can refer to only in the vaguest terms. To cover them as they deserve, and as the victims so desperately wish, would challenge a part of our legal system shrouded in an almost impenetrable veil of secrecy.

Two weeks ago I recounted four examples of what I described as one of the greatest scandals in Britain today – the seizing of children by social workers from loving families, on what appears to be the flimsiest and most questionable grounds. The children may then be handed on to foster carers, who can receive up to £400 a week for each child, or are put out for adoption, in a way which too often leads to intense distress for both the parents and the children involved.

One case I referred to concerns a north London couple whose five children were seized in April by social workers from Haringey council and sent into foster care. The mother was then pregnant, and her baby was born last month. Shortly afterwards, according to her account, nine police officers and social workers burst into her hospital room at 3am and, as she lay breastfeeding, wrested her baby from her arms with considerable force. Discovering they had nowhere to put the baby, the authorities took it to another part of the hospital, where the mother was escorted four times a day to feed her child, until she was discharged four days later.

Having talked at length to the mother, I found this story so shocking that I put a series of questions to the council, to get their side of the story. The response of Haringey (which, since the national furore over its failure to prevent the battering to death of Baby P, has been somewhat sensitive on these issues) was to ask the High Court to rule that I should not be allowed to write about the case at all. In the end, the court did not go that far, but The Sunday Telegraph was reminded of the comprehensive restrictions on reporting such stories.

After spending several hours with the parents, looking at their neat home, the little beds where their children used to sleep and the cot prepared for the baby, I came away more convinced than ever that something was seriously amiss. I found the wife impressive in her detailed account of the events, clearly a devoted mother who feels herself and her children to have been the victims of an extraordinary error – the nature of which, alas, I cannot reveal.

This week, two days have been set aside for the mother to put her case to a judge. Despite the tragedy that has torn their family apart, the parents have never previously had an opportunity to challenge Haringey council's version of the story. I only hope the court takes particular care to check out the evidence put before it, and that in due course I can fully report a case that sheds a revealing light on a system supposedly devised to protect the interests of the children but which too often seems to result in the very opposite... deprived of any right to put their case, not just to the courts but to anyone who might be able to help them.

It is a system hermetically sealed off, in which the fate of parents and children can be decided by an incestuously closed community of social workers, police, lawyers, doctors and other professional "experts", who all too often seem to work together in an alliance which is ruthlessly oblivious to the interests of the families who fall into its clutches. Again and again I have heard of the misery of children torn from their distraught parents, forced to live unhappily in the hands of inadequate foster carers, and whose only wish is to be returned to those they know and love.

The more I learn about this scandal, the more I understand why, in April, an Appeal Court judge, Lord Aikens, savaged the actions of Devon county council social workers in a forced adoption case as having been "more like Stalin's Russia or Mao's China than the west of England".. The council's lawyers were told to read a judgment by Lord Justice Wall, now head of the High Court's Family Division, which condemned Greenwich social workers as "enthusiastic removers of children".
It is high time the veils of secrecy were ripped from this national outrage; that politicians intervened to call the system to order; and that the press was free to bring properly to light family tragedies such as those I have only been allowed to hint at above.

There could have been few more bizarre meetings anywhere in Britain last week than that between a married mother and the social workers who had taken her six young children to place them unhappily in foster care. The officials, of a council I cannot name, are fixated with the idea that this respectable Christian is a "sex worker", whose children all have different fathers and who is engaged in "child trafficking".

They appear to have no evidence for these charges other than the hearsay surmising of a single "witness". I gather that the social workers had reluctantly agreed to commission DNA testing of parents and children, to establish whether they were all from the same father. But even now, I am told, the social workers are refusing to disclose the test results.

The mother, accompanied to this surreal interrogation by a nun who had known her for years, insisted that she had only slept with one man in her life, her husband, the father of her children. She went on to ask one of the social workers how many men she had slept with. The reply was that this was a private matter.

Perhaps we are not very far here from those extraordinary cases some 20 years ago when children were torn away from their families wholesale because social workers had concocted a fantasy that they were being abused in weird satanic rituals (a story I told in my book Scared To Death).
It is vitally important that when this case again comes before the courts, the judge should put the council's supposed evidence to very careful test.

Last week I listened for an hour to a sobbing mother describing how she recently lost the six-year-old daughter who is the centre of her life. Her fatal mistake was to ask social workers for advice when she was being troubled by "harassment" from the child's father, from whom she parted some years ago. Within days, although it was never suggested that she had harmed her daughter in any way, she found herself facing a "case conference" of 20 people at the local council offices, the conclusion of which was that her child must be placed in foster care.

The solicitor she was given by the social workers refused to oppose the care order. At a "contact" session, when she and her bewildered daughter emotionally expressed their love for each other, the interview was halted. She has not been allowed to see her child again.

Having followed dozens of such cases in recent months, which suggest that something has gone horribly wrong with our child protection system, I was recently invited for an off-the-record ministerial discussion about what I have been reporting. But far from recognising that anything might be astray, the official line, it seems, is that the horrifying cases I have covered represent only an untypical minority of the total – "less than 10 per cent". In general, the system is working fine.

This line seems to be confirmed by the latest guidance issued to local authorities by the Children's Minister, Tim Loughton, who says that too many councils are failing to ensure that enough children are being adopted, and that the backsliders must speed up their flow of adoptions. No question as to whether social workers might be snatching too many of the wrong children in the first place – or why the courts seem so eager to support them that, of around 8,000 applications made each year for care orders, only one in 400 is refused.

I shall give just one disturbing instance of the latest developments in a case I have been following for months. Like many others, this came to me through the Forced Adoption website, run by former councillor Ian Josephs. It involves a married couple whose five older children were seized earlier this year, subsequent to which their latest baby was torn from its mother's arms only hours after it was born.

The bizarre story originally stated by the social workers to justify their ruthless intervention in this family's life seems to have collapsed. At a recent court hearing, I am told, the judge seemed disposed to reunite the family as soon as possible. The baby was returned to her parents later that day. But the council asked for 21 days' stay of execution before returning the five older children, three of whom the parents had not been allowed to see for weeks. The judge apparently agreed but insisted that an independent social worker should interview the children.

The independent social worker eventually managed to interview four of the children, apparently reporting that they all wished to be allowed to go home to their parents. But the court refused to give the parents a copy of the judge's ruling, and on Friday they were summoned back to hear from him that he had now seemingly changed his mind and that the children did not wish to come home after all. According to the parents, they were not allowed to question the evidence on which he based his new ruling, although they were told they could appeal.

What on earth is going on here? Even from the little I am permitted to report of this case, it seems evident that something seriously odd is afoot.
But this is merely one of far too many cases where families are being heartlessly torn apart, often without the parents even being allowed to question the evidence or to speak for themselves. To hear such horror stories being dismissed as representing "less than 10 per cent" of all the cases where children are seized is simply not good enough. Each is shocking enough in its own right. But when every week brings news of a dozen more, this only confirms that we indeed have a national scandal on our hands.

Last Tuesday I dined in a smart Knightsbridge restaurant with Ian Josephs, who runs the Forced Adoption website, his wife, a mother whom I cannot name and her delightful five-month-old baby, who sat in a high chair perfectly behaved throughout. This was the baby who, shortly after she was born in June, was torn from her mother’s arms in hospital at 3am by six policemen and three social workers. Two months earlier, social workers had also snatched the mother’s five older children, to put them in foster care, costing taxpayers more than £2,000 a week.

On Tuesday afternoon, the mother had been unexpectedly told that she could have contact with two of her children, miles from north London where she lives. Yet again, when she arrived at the contact centre, she was told that the children were not coming, although apparently they long to see her. On returning to the station with her baby, given back to her by the court six weeks ago, she found that all trains had been cancelled because of the snow, forcing her to return to London by taxi at a cost of £50.

This was yet another instalment of a cat and mouse game the council has been playing with the parents for months, telling them they can see their children, only for them frequently to hear, after their long journey, that some or all of the children were not available after all. (It happened again last Friday.)

Months ago the court ordered that the children should be brought back into London, nearer their home. Meanwhile, the council should give the parents a travel voucher, worth more than £30 a time, for their journey. Only once did the council provide a voucher, which the parents discovered on the return journey was one-way only, costing them £100 in penalties.

Since then the court order has been ignored and the parents have had to pay up to £150 a week to see their children, only to be told on arrival that the agreed contact has been cancelled.Meanwhile, the case used to justify the seizing of the children has been collapsing in all directions, although the parents have not once been allowed to challenge the extraordinary statements made about them. Not until next year, 10 months after this family was ruthlessly broken up, will there be a final hearing to decide whether this utterly heartless farce can at last be brought to an end. If and when the facts about this barely credible story can be reported, it will be worthy of the front page.

Last week I reported on the cruel cat-and-mouse game a north London council is playing with the parents of five children who, against court orders, have been kept in foster care miles from their home. Several times a week, at a cost of more than £40, including taxis, the mother, carrying her five-month-old baby, travels to an agreed contact with her unhappy children, only to be told on arrival that they are not available. In the past fortnight this has happened six times.

Why cannot the mother be told this before she leaves home? Last week, the fostering agency Capstone Vision claimed that the fault for this outrageous behaviour lies with the council social workers, who seem determined to punish the mother for the fact that all their original excuses for seizing the children have been exposed as malicious fictions

Two senior judges of the immigration court rule it illegal, under the Human Rights Act, to deport an asylum seeker who dragged along under his car a dying 12-year-old girl he had run over – because it would be in breach of his right to enjoy “family life” with his children (even though he no longer lives with them).

How strikingly this contrasts with the suffering inflicted on those parents whose five children, as reported here more than once, were snatched from them last April by London social workers, on suspicions which have since, it appears, turned out to be malicious fabrications.

A council whistleblower has said that, at a recent case conference, the social workers admitted that maybe they had made a mistake, and that the mother they had falsely accused was in fact devoted and blameless. But apparently, because of “press interest” in the case, the officials agreed that the council could not afford the very damaging publicity which might follow if the unhappy children were reunited with their parents. It was therefore vital that the council should continue to justify its actions.
The case comes up again in court very soon. In the name of this family’s human rights, it must be hoped that the judge examines the evidence very carefully indeed.

One of the most disturbing features of this system, which protects itself behind a wall of secrecy, is how far it goes to ensure that aggrieved parents are represented only by lawyers who are themselves accomplices of the system. Again and again parents are bemused to find that the lawyers they were advised to use seem unwilling to challenge the case being made against them, however spurious.

Of all the cases I have followed, none is more bizarre than that of a couple whose six children were snatched by social workers last year on evidence which seemed at best highly questionable and was at worst an absurd fiction. The mother was advised to use a solicitor, on legal aid, who she felt was so much on the other side that she discharged him. Just before Christmas, when the council’s case seemed to be falling apart, I tracked down one of the very rare solicitors who has a reputation for fighting the system. His firm applied to the Legal Services Commission for transfer of the legal aid, and when the LSC seemed to be delaying its response, I paid £2,000 from my own pocket to enable the firm to start work.

The local authority learned, it seemed before anyone else, that the LSC would not allow the transfer from the solicitor who had been discharged – and the head of the council’s legal department then sent the mother a list of other solicitors who would be able to take her case on legal aid. By the time the solicitor to whom I had given £2,000 heard that he had been turned down, he was able to present me with a bill which, including VAT, came to exactly £2,000.

By now another solicitor had appeared, who seemed keen to take on the case for a reduced fee. Ian Josephs, who runs the Forced Adoption website, advanced £3,500 towards her fees, on an understanding that she could take the case through to its final hearing for a total of £5,000. Three days before they were due in court, this solicitor too – after a long conversation with one of the array of lawyers appearing, at huge public expense, for the other side – said she was unable to continue working on the case. She has not, so far, offered to return any of the money.

The mother now faces, without legal representation, a final hearing which could result in her losing her children forever. They live, unhappily, in separate foster homes, at a cost to the taxpayer of well over £100,000 a year. She and her husband came to this country a decade ago, full of hope: now she feels utterly betrayed by a system which seems ruthlessly bent on destroying her family. Her only wish is to escape this incomprehensible nightmare and return with her husband to their native country. But to do so, they would have to abandon any hope of seeing their beloved children again..

{It is understood Mr. Booker has now been restrained in certain ways from reporting again on certain aspects of this case.}

...no fancy letters...or blather.

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