LGBTI collectives and relatives protested on Monday at the British Embassy in Mexico to demand that both countries intervene for Manuel Guerrero, a homosexual man of Mexican and British citizenship, arrested a month ago in Qatar for his sexual orientation.
“The Mexican state and the British state must take action. They are torturing a Mexican citizen and a British citizen in their faces, we want Manuel free and we want him safe and sound,” Enrique Guerrero, the detainee’s brother, told the media.
The man denounced to the media that the authorities of Qatar took away Manuel’s HIV medications again, although just last Friday the Mexican Foreign Ministry affirmed that he already had access to the drugs.
In addition, Enrique asserted that the Qatari police are interrogating Manuel to share a list of his sexual partners to also persecute them.
“Torture has an absolute prohibition, you cannot torture under any pretext, much less for someone to confess with whom they have had sexual relations. Those acts are unacceptable,” he said.
The Manuel Guerrero Committee, made up of groups of sexual diversity to follow up on the case, reported last week of the arrest of the Mexican that occurred on February 4 in Doha, the capital of Qatar, where he has lived for seven years.
The group detailed that the Qatari police itself created a fake profile on Grindr, a dating application from which they contacted Manuel to arrange a meeting with him after posing as a homosexual man.
“Manuel is a gay man who was arbitrarily detained by the Qatari authorities, only for the sole reason of being gay and living with HIV,” said Pepe Aguilar, director of the organization Racismo MX, at the demonstration.
Although at first the Mexican Embassy in Qatar issued a statement in which it argued that it could not intervene at all because Manuel registered in the country as a British citizen, the Foreign Ministry later exposed that it is already attending the case.
The collectives demanded this Monday that both the Mexican and the British governments intervene, for which they met with the British ambassador, Jon Benjamin.
“We demand Manuel’s release and the active involvement of the UK government. The UK is a government that through its embassies has shown a very strong commitment to the LGBT community, so it is time to demonstrate this commitment,” Aguilar said.
Source: Forbes
