Minister Makes False Statement In Parliament

Minister of the Interior Hanna Birna Kristjánsdóttir made claims about the leaked memo on Nigerian asylum seeker Tony Omos which have proved false.

DV reports that the minister, addressing parliament on January 27, told her colleagues, “The memo that has been appearing from some media outlets, and here and there, is not comparable to any documents in the ministry.”

This statement has proved untrue. The document in question is actually on the ministry’s registry, and is reportedly exactly the same as the memo which wasleaked to select members of the media last November, with one key exception – anadditional sentence was added, some time before its appearance in the media, which impugned the reputations of both Tony Omos and the mother of his child, Evelyn Glory Joseph. The accusations in this sentence would later prove untrue.

This memo was created at the behest of the minister, DV reports, and her assistants on November 19. However, the memo was not put on the ministry register until some time later. Until that time, the only people who had access to the memo were the ministry employee(s) who wrote it, the minister and her assistants, Gísli Freyr Valdórsson and Þórey Vilhjálmsdóttir.

Furthermore, the minister has refused to answer written questions from several MPs regarding the case, including Social Democrats Valgerður Bjarnadóttir and Mörðar Árnason. Social Democrat chairperson Árni Páll Árnason harshly criticised the minister last week for the silence, saying, “I seriously doubt a ministry in Denmark could refuse to answer parliament with important information of this kind. It should be easy to answer these questions, whether there’s a police investigation going on or not.”

As reported, capital area police and the Special Prosecutor are currently conducting a criminal investigation of the ministry, after lawyers for both Tony and Evelyn filed charges against the ministry, including breach of confidentiality, slander, and abuse of public office.

For more on this story, see An Open Letter To Minister Of The Interior Hanna Birna Kristjánsdóttir and So Who’s This Tony Omos I Keep Hearing About?