A Home Office boss in charge of housing Afghan refugees in the UK says her team will "feel guilt forever" after a five-year-old boy fell to his death from a window at one of their sites.
Mohammed Munib Majeedi fell from a window of the OYO Metropolitan Hotel in Sheffield at around 2.30pm last Wednesday.
Mohammed and his family had fled Afghanistan, where his father had worked at the UK embassy in Kabul, just a few weeks before the young boy fell about 70ft from a ninth-floor room, landing in a car park behind the hotel.
The hotel has been used to house Afghans and their families who aided the British Army and authorities during the Taliban resurgence in Afghanistan.
Emma Haddad, who was appointed Director General for Asylum and Protection in the Home Office in February 2021, said she and her team were "heartbroken" over the boy's death.
Writing in The Telegraph, Haddad said: "The beginning of one family's new life in the UK was so cruelly shattered and left in pieces.
"We are all heartbroken. We have all been in tears."
The Telegraph reported that OYO Metropolitan Hotel had been used to house 16 Afghan refugee families with up to 85 children.
The government official, who runs the UK’s resettlement programmes for refugees, said she and her team "will feel guilt and responsibility for this tragic death forever".
Ms Haddad added: "Many of us are also parents. That could have been my eight-year-old.
"We are not faceless bureaucrats with no empathy – the emotions are overwhelming us.
"I can't begin to imagine the pain the family of the little boy is going through, and it will take us all a long time to process what happened."
Dr Haddad insisted the hotels used to house refugee families had to undergo "stringent health and safety checks" but The Sun reported that a mother complained about the hotel two years ago.
She said the windows caused "huge health and safety issues," in a post on the hotel's Facebook page.
Eerily, she added: "I could not open the window as it opened so wide I was scared my children would fall out."
The Telegraph also reported that refugees were removed from the hotel last year because of health and safety risks, particularly concerns about fire.
Labour MPs in Sheffield have since demanded a "full, urgent, independent inquiry" after asylum seekers were previously moved out of the accommodation.
Labour shadow frontbencher Louise Haigh, who is also MP for Sheffield Heeley, said: "The Home Office has a duty of care when placing asylum seekers of any description, but especially under their resettlement scheme, here in the UK, and clearly that duty of care has been at the very least undermined, if not breached."
She added: "We know that the Home Office placed some refugees there last August, in 2020, and then moved them following concerns about the suitability of that accommodation," she said.
"So why vulnerable families from Afghanistan, involving children, were placed in this accommodation again this year is a very serious question that they have to urgently answer."
