Migrant worker who lost legs begins fightback

Alan Erwin

Just a month after being found on Northern Ireland's streets, in agony and suffering from frostbite, she has been transferred to a rehabilitation unit where new limbs are to be fitted.

The process is expected to take months while new details emerge about her movements before becoming destitute.

Ms Sukhanova, 23, has spoken by telephone to her mother at home in the Ukraine, but it is unlikely she will travel to Northern Ireland in the near future.

Staff at Musgrave Park Hospital in Belfast, encouraged by her progress, have supplied her with several Russian novels to help her pass the time between surgery and sessions of intensive physiotherapy.

A hospital source confirmed: "She is practically eating books. I've had to order her Pushkin and the classics off the internet."

Uncertainty has surrounded Ms Sukhanova's movements for the three months after her contract with a poultry firm was terminated. It has emerged that she stayed at the Manor Hotel in Ballymoney, Co Antrim, before spending nine days she cannot now recall on the streets of the town.

Ms Sukhanova arrived in Northern Ireland on a one-year contract to begin work at McKeown's Fine Foods in Rasharkin, Co Antrim, on March 19 last year, but on September 17 the firm laid her off, citing health and safety reasons.

She had registered with police, as required under the one-year Home Office licence, and held two meetings with a foreign nationals officer. However, once she stopped working at the factory and left a house in Ballymoney shared by other Ukrainian and Latvian employees, the authorities lost track.

Ms Sukhanova is then believed to have moved in with a group of Polish friends in the town. It had been thought she had nowhere to stay once they returned home, but it has emerged that she first booked into one of the nine rooms at the modest Manor Hotel.

Finally she returned to the house where her ex-colleagues lived, in the grip of hypothermia, and an ambulance was called on New Year's Day.

She has so far been unable to recall any detail about a nine-day blackout after leaving the hotel, other than telling how she was sleeping near derelict properties. Immigration services were then alerted by police. The Manor confirmed she checked in to the £20-a-night premises on December 10. Ten days later, she left without telling anybody. A member of staff spoke of his sadness and frustration that she did not seek help before leaving. He said: "We could see no problems. She was here on her own and nobody came to see her.

"If she had come forward and said 'I'm in trouble', she would have got all the assistance she needed. For the sake of £20, we would not have turned her away."

After her plight provoked public shock, her former employers McKeown's said it urged her to return to the Ukraine and offered to pay her air fare, as well as informing the Eastern European agency who organised her employment. British Home Office officials have been under growing pressure to disclose why she was not sent home after her contract was terminated. It is unclear how much Home Office staff at Work Permits UK, which runs the Sectors Based Scheme (SBS) for migrant workers, knew about her change in circumstances.

Human rights campaigners in Europe and the US alerted to the case have expressed concern over a possible systems breakdown.