Refugee wrongly labelled child murderer says decades of his life wasted

Mayooran Thangaratnam had hoped to attend university in the UK, instead he spent years in destitution and faced three attempts to deport him. Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The Guardian

A refugee who was wrongly recorded as being a child murderer by the Home Office says delays in his case have led to him wasting almost two decades of his life.

Mayooran Thangaratnam, a 41-year-old Tamil from Sri Lanka, fled to the UK in 2003 at the age of 23 and claimed asylum. He provided evidence to the Home Office from media reports that his father, a journalist who passed information to the UN about the Sri Lankan government’s persecution of Tamils, was murdered by Sri Lankan forces and that his life was also in danger.