Mo Naeimi escaped from Iran in 2022

AN Iranian refugee has recounted his extraordinary journey to the UK after fleeing persecution by his country’s authoritarian regime.

Mo Naeimi escaped from Iran in 2022 after his friends were arrested for visiting home churches and he was suspected of converting to Christianity.

A 20-day treacherous journey saw him bundled into trucks and lorries by people smugglers from Iran to Turkey, and then through Europe, before coming to Dover on a small boat.

Mr Naeimi described how the boat, crammed with 25 people, began to flood as they crossed the Channel.

He said: “There was a hole in the boat. The whole time, I had a bottle of water, and I just threw the water away and I used it to empty the water, and for three hours I used my arm to empty the water.

“As soon as we passed the border, I felt that my arm is feeling numb, I can’t feel it any more. And the last time that I emptied the water, my hand couldn’t hold the bottle, so the bottle just went away. We tried to hold the water, so we didn’t sink. We saw a police boat coming, so we said please save us. The whole boat was covered in water.”

Although the journey was “beautifully terrifying”, Mr Naeimi said it was nothing compared to the days spent in the “jungles of Europe” in the height of winter.

He said: “We’d been in the middle of I don’t know which country, but as it was winter, it was so cold, it was snowing, seven days without food. Even the soldiers I didn’t understand. They were shouting, swearing, the smugglers were saying ‘they are swearing at you guys’. We didn’t know what they meant.”

The English teacher added: “I knew they weren’t English soldiers. It was snowing. I slept for five days in the snow. And the last two days, I gave away my clothes to a family. They were a couple with a little child. So I gave them my jacket. And nowadays I cannot feel the cold weather. My system is completely messed up.”

After arriving on UK soil, however, Mr Naeimi was taken to Luton before being told he would be moved to a hotel in Clerkenwell.

Here, he said his knowledge of English helped him, but that the loneliness was crippling. “The staff they don’t help you,” he said. “They don’t care if you’re alive, if you’re breathing. They just check your name, ‘oh yes good this guy got his food’.”

He recalls a group of people gathered outside the hotel while he was living there, shouting that he and other residents “shouldn’t be here”.

Mr Naeimi said: “I used to wish they could just live like us for a week, not a year, not a month, just for a week. How we eat, and what we see, the pressure we get. But I found that that wish is so cruel, I hate to wish anyone to be in that situation, to feel what we felt and what these people are feeling now.”

After getting his status, the teacher worried he would be homeless after leaving the hotel. He found a free tent on the app Olio, and planned to sleep on the streets.

He said: “I was sure that I was going to be homeless. So I had the tent, I packed my stuff in boxes, that I thought I’m going to put it in the corner of the tent. I still have that tent.”

But Mr Naeimi eventually found accommodation through a nun that he went to church with. He said: “She always calls me grandson, and I call her granny. And she told [another churchgoer] that she didn’t have family, but now she’s got me.”

Mr Naeimi now supports fellow refugees being housed in hotels in Islington, helping with English language classes.

He told the Tribune: “I don’t wish for them to live in this situation. But I want them to know that it is so horrible, so painful.

“And loneliness is something, when you have no friends, no family, no loved ones, no one loves you, it is horrible.”