U.S. deportees assaulted, threatened in Equatorial Guinea

Holmes said the tendons in her hands were damaged from being handcuffed too tightly by the armed men at the hotel July 31, and she’s still experiencing pain in her wrists a week later.

That night, Holmes went downstairs to investigate after hearing Chambers scream, she said. One of the armed men “shoved me really hard, then shoved me again,” Holmes said. “He said, ‘Put cuffs on her.'”

Nearby, the armed men repeatedly kicked Soliman’s legs, in an attempt to bring him to the ground, after they saw him trying to record the incident on his phone, all three detainees said.

Another man was choked and thrown against the wall, then handcuffed and held on the ground for an hour, Soliman said.

“They were telling us things like, we’re getting too comfortable in this hotel, they don’t want us in this country, and ‘There’s a reason America didn’t even want you guys,'” he recalled. 

“They’re telling us that as if we have a choice, as if I’m sitting here with a passport enjoying my time in this awful hotel,” said Soliman, who said he was deported without any travel documents.

The deportees were violently dragged down four flights of stairs, cuffed and eventually taken outside where police vans were waiting. They were told they were going to prison, for unclear reasons, before being released later that night, the deportees said.

The men wielding high-powered weapons smelled strongly of alcohol that night, and they appear to be intoxicated on a daily basis, all three deportees told the Star.

“The way they were acting, this is not the way police officers are supposed to act. You have a gun, and you’re stone drunk,” Holmes said. “For you to come manhandle us like this, we’re not used to that. We grew up in the United States. That’s where all our family is.”