Unwell refugee’s friends wrote letter asking for medical intervention a week before he died

PAPUA NEW GUINEA – In the days before Sudanese refugee Faysal Ishak Ahmed collapsed and died, he pleaded with doctors inside the Manus Island detention centre to treat him, having been “more than 20 times” to see medical staff, who had been unable to arrest his worsening condition.

Sudanese refugees inside the detention centre were so worried by his repeated seizures and collapses that they wrote a letter outlining months of escalating health complaints that, they said, had been ignored by medical staff.

Ahmed, 27, collapsed inside the detention centre on Thursday morning. According to a witness, Ahmed had been removed to the voluntary supported rest area – usually used to protect people suffering mental health episodes – complaining of chest pains.

“Another patient heard him saying, ‘I cannot breathe, my heart has stopped’, and shortly afterwards he fell down on his forehead with thick liquid and water came out through his nose and mouth,” the witness said.

Ahmed was taken by air ambulance to Brisbane on Friday, but died in hospital on Saturday.

On December 15, exactly a week before he collapsed, Ahmed had written to International Medical Health Services, the multinational company with the contract to provide health services inside Australia’s detention regime, complaining his health concerns were being ignored.

In faltering English, Ahmed said he had chest and heart problems, and high blood pressure.

After he collapsed last week, but while he was still alive, Ahmed’s compatriot refugees and asylum seekers wrote a four-page letter to IHMS pleading with doctors to “give him the kind of treatment his problem needs before its too late instead of hiding the facts from him”.

They detailed seizures and breathing difficulties Ahmed had suffered since September.

The letter alleged that Ahmed saw a GP on December 21 and he was told by the GP there was “nothing wrong” and was told he would not be seen by any doctor again in the future and IHMS could help him anymore with his problem.

The letter said; “When he came back from his appointment he was very much affected by the reply of the IHMS that they would be assisting him in the future.

“He kept saying ‘I swear, I am not pretending that this disease would kill me’. His condition got worse and worse on that day.”

The letter-writers asked that Ahmed be treated immediately.

“We have got nothing in our power to help him, but we are kindly and humbly giving you this piece of advice so as to take it into consideration immediately before it’s too late,” they wrote.

An IHMS spokeswoman told Guardian Australia: “As this matter will be referred to the Queensland coroner, IHMS is not in a position to respond to your questions. IHMS expresses its sympathies to his family and friends.”

Behrouz Boochani, an Iranian journalist and refugee held in detention on Manus Island, said a protest led by detainees following Ahmed’s death – in which guards were forced to withdraw from the two compounds and some windows were broken – was “a message to the government that it cannot hide the truth”.

He said detainees had no other way to resist their detention, which was ruled illegal by Papua New Guinea’s supreme court eight months ago. The PNG and Australian governments have agreed to close the centre, but neither has committed to a time frame.

Boochani said: “We are victims in this prison and Australia is killing us one by one, and I would like to ask people to put themselves in our shoes, ‘what could we do at that moment?’

“I, as a person who lived under a dictatorship, found out that a different version of dictatorship and a new version of fascism exists in this prison. How many times should I write in a peaceful way and how many years should I fight in a peaceful way?”

Healthcare in Australia’s immigration detention centres is under acute scrutiny, with a coronial inquest under way into the death of Hamid Kehazaei, an Iranian asylum seeker who died in a Brisbane hospital in September 2014 after delays in moving him from Manus.

Kehazaei, 24, had originally presented with a small infection in his leg that developed into sepsis and eventually caused a series of heart attacks.

The Queensland state coroner earlier heard that the Manus Island medical facilities were inadequate, doctors’ clinical instructions were ignored and critical medical equipment was not working.

Requests to urgently transfer Kehazaei from the island were ignored, then refused, before he was finally flown in an air ambulance, first to Port Moresby and then to Brisbane.

Several other asylum seekers and refugees have died in immigration detention or on detention islands.

Reza Barati was murdered by guards inside the Manus detention centre in 2014, and in 2016, Omid Masoumali died after dousing himself in lighter fluid and setting himself alight on Nauru, in protest at being held indefinitely on the island.

Other refugees suffering serious medical complaints – including pregnant woman facing complex births, or suspected cancerous growths – have been denied medical transfers from detention islands.

- Guardian