By CAM LUCADOU-WELLS
A VICTIM of lawless violence in his homeland, refugee Mehdi Hassani aims to protect others from the same fate.
Mr Hassani, 23, of Hampton Park, is studying a TAFE justice course in the hope of applying to join Victoria Police.
“I was thinking what career would set me up. It would be very good to be a police officer.
“I want others to avoid what happened to me.”
He remains wounded by an awful experience that led him to flee for his life from Afghanistan.
“The law is not upheld there. To be a police officer there was to be a threat to your life.”
After a holiday, he and his brother were bundled into a car at gunpoint by kidnappers outside an airport terminal near the Afghan town of Shindand.
The captors put bags on the siblings’ heads and drove for an hour.
The car stopped, and they were told to push the car.
Mr Hassani remembers telling his brother they would die unless they escaped. So they ran, tearing the bags from their heads.
Bullets were fired. Mr Hassani lost sight of his brother, who he has not seen again since.
Mr Hassani’s not sure if his captors were Taliban or a criminal affiliation.
He had been threatened for several years beforehand due to his IT work with a foreign construction company and with American embassies.
“I didn’t take the threats seriously until this happened,” he said.
“It cost my brother’s life.”
In the following weeks, his parents received ominous calls, demanding Mr Hassani or else his brother would be killed.
Mr Hassani’s parents, who have regularly moved to evade their stalkers, told him to leave the country.
“They had lost one son and didn’t want to lose another,” he says.
He paid a people smuggler to get him to Indonesia, arriving in Australia in November with a United Nations humanitarian refugee visa.
Mr Hassani lives with his sister and her family, saving from his meagre government allowance to send money to his parents.
He has improved his English at refugee settlement agency AMES, and is currently taking a Certificate IV course in Justice.
He expects to hit the books for a further four years.
“I’m enjoying my studies,” he says. “I’m suffering from little income now but that’s just for four more years.
“It’s not the rest of my life.”
