Anti-racism campaigners are to stage a demonstration in Glasgow to call for decent residential housing for all asylum seekers.
Stand Up To Racism will take to the Home Office on Brand Street on Wednesday at 6pm demanding change following a stabbing on West George Street last week which left multiple people in hospital.
Six people were stabbed, including 42-year-old Constable David Whyte - and the attacker Badreddin Abadlla Adam was shot dead by police in the incident at the Park Inn hotel.
READ MORE: New questions over treatment of asylum seekers in Glasgow after Park Inn attack
Asylum seeker supporters say Mr Adam, was "neglected, humiliated, and isolated" and was "distressed the night before the incident".
Stand Up To Racism say the incident was an 'avoidable tragedy', and the Home Office and housing provider Mears Group have 'serious questions to answer'.
A spokesman said: "Throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, asylum seekers, asylum rights activists, charities and others in civic Scotland have been warning about the dreadful conditions faced by asylum seekers who were forced to move, often at no more than half-an-hour’s notice, from their settled homes and into inadequate hotel accommodation.
"The asylum seekers had their paltry daily allowance of £5.39 removed. Unable to buy daily essentials or top-up mobile phones, they were isolated and often fed inadequate food. Many talked of feeling “imprisoned” in their hotel rooms.
"Both the Home Office and Mears Group have serious questions to answer.
"The uprooting of asylum seekers from their homes into hotels was always a bad response to the Covid-19 crisis.
"Many asylum seekers are living with trauma or long-term mental health problems associated with their harrowing life experiences.
"Transferring them to isolated hotel rooms beside strangers, without suitable vulnerability checks by either Mears or the Home Office was always a terrible idea."
The group have laid out a series of changes they want to see, which include an immediate end to hotel detention, decent residential housing and proper vulnerability checks to identify mental health needs.
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