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When the United Kingdom's Labour Party came to power last year, one of the first things it did was scrap a controversial scheme to send asylum seekers to Rwanda. But it was too late for a handful of people who had already been sent there.
Among them was 24-year-old Hamshika - a Sri Lankan Tamil who arrived in Rwanda in March 2023.
This is her story.
In the late 1990s, Hamshika's parents fled the civil war in Sri Lanka and settled in a refugee camp in India. That is where Hamshika was born in 2000, as war raged between Sri Lankan government forces and the separatist group the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in their homeland.
The fighting was the outcome of longstanding ethnic tensions between the Sinhalese majority and the Tamil minority. More than 100,000 people were killed during the 26-year war.
Hamshika's family returned to Sri Lanka in 2004 when the fighting was less intense and moved to her parents’ hometown. During the war - and after it - Tamil civilians suspected of having LTTE ties were persecuted by the authorities. Hamshika’s father was accused of providing food to LTTE fighters, and was arrested.
As a child, Hamshika developed a love of photography. After leaving school, she opened a shop, printing cards, posters and photos. Many of her customers wanted to print photos of family members who had disappeared during the war to display in public spaces as they called for justice.
Around the time Hamshika started her business, mass graves were being discovered around her town of Mannar. They contained the bodies of Tamils slain during the conflict.
“They were all around … in areas that had been under the control of the Sri Lankan army during the war,” she recalls. “I remember seeing the bones of people being dug from under the ground.”
The families of thousands of missing Tamil civilians demanded to know what had happened to them.
Hamshika went to demonstrations, armed with her camera. “I was a photographer, it was my duty to go out and take pictures,” she says.
But her work caught the attention of the authorities, and in 2021, she was arrested and accused of collaborating with remnants of the LTTE.
Hamshika was detained, beaten and burned with cigarettes before being released. The burn scars on her legs and ankles are still visible today.
After her ordeal, soldiers made several unannounced visits to her home - purportedly to check documents - intimidating her family.
Then Hamshika's father, who asked not to be named in this story, was arrested and tortured because of his connection to her. After his release, he left for India by boat. Hamshika joined him soon after. Both hoped their departure would keep the rest of their family safe.
In India, they exchanged a set of earrings and a necklace for passage on a boat leaving for Canada - a weeks-long, 22,531km (14,000-mile) boat journey across the Pacific Ocean.
In late September 2021, Hamshika, her father and 87 other Tamil asylum seekers left southern India on a 20-metre-long wooden fishing vessel.
The journey was difficult from the start. The sea was rough and many were seasick. Some slipped and injured themselves on the wet deck. To avoid falling overboard, the travellers took turns to rest on the safest parts of the crowded deck.
When the drinking water ran out, Hamshika and others drank from the sea, which made many ill. Hamshika remembers vomiting blood.
Meanwhile, a hole appeared in the hull, letting in water.
On the 11th night, the passengers saw lights in the distance. They only realised it was an island and not another boat at dawn. After days of the vessel being in distress, Hamshika remembers feeling relieved when a speedboat approached to tow them to the island.
The island was Diego Garcia, the largest of the Chagos Islands, which were colonised by the British who forcefully displaced the Indigenous population in the 1960s.
After 9/11, the island in the Indian Ocean became a major launch site for military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, and was allegedly used for the CIA's rendition programme where alleged "terrorism" suspects were kidnapped, tortured and held in secret overseas prisons.
United Nations resolutions have called for full decolonisation of the Chagos Islands. The United Kingdom signed a deal this year to hand back the archipelago to Mauritius and allow long-displaced Chagossians to resettle their islands - all but Diego Garcia, where a UK-US military base will remain in place under a 99-year lease.
On the remote, tropical island with white sand and palm trees, Hamshika and the other refugees were taken to a field the size of a football pitch with some empty US army tents. A metal seven-foot fence and basic sanitary facilities were quickly erected.
The private firm G4S ran security at the site, while the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT) administration oversaw the camp.
Hamshika and her father shared a tent and one toilet with 15 other men, women and children. She and other asylum seekers say BIOT officials said that if they tried to leave, American soldiers stationed on the island could shoot them.
Soon after arriving, Hamshika was sexually assaulted by male refugees. She reported the assault to BIOT, but says they only started investigating her case after others started to report sexual harassment.
Forced to be in the same space as the men who attacked her, Hamshika was scared. There was no space, no privacy and no access to sanitary products. They were not allowed to cook and the food they received was sometimes rotten. Rats infested the tents and Hamshika soon grew used to sleeping among the rodents.
After not being able to call home, the refugees went on a hunger strike until they were permitted to make five-minute phone calls. Nearly two months after arriving on the island, Hamshika was able to let her mother know that she and her father were alive.
“I remember calling my mother first, and then saving the last two minutes to ring my boyfriend, and ask him to pray for me,” she says.
More boats carrying Tamil refugees arrived in 2022 and the camp grew even more crowded.
People hoped they would be able to claim asylum in the UK or another safe country.
Instead, Hamshika remembers a British official telling them they would be sent back to Sri Lanka. “[He told me] we were all criminals and we would be sent back,” she recalls. That was when Hamshika started to self-harm and attempted suicide.
After being held for more than 500 days on the island, Hamshika was airlifted to Rwanda for medical care. Her father was allowed to join her. Several others were taken to Rwanda for medical care after self-harm and suicide attempts. By then, the UK’s Conservative government had brokered its deal to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda.
Their building was next to a courtyard with bars, and the nights were loud with music and drunk people talking and shouting.
After their flat was burgled twice, Hamshika’s father started moving the couch in front of the door every night to sleep there, fearing someone might try to break in again.
As the only Sri Lankans in the neighbourhood, they stood out and not everyone took kindly to them being there. Some locals would shout at them or make threats. Once, her father was attacked on the street when he went out to buy groceries with the small weekly allowance provided by BIOT.
Still, the two had their own space, running water and could cook for themselves. They were given phones and could call their family in Sri Lanka. But Hamshika says she still felt like she was living in an open-air prison.
In Diego Garcia, Hamshika was not allowed to claim asylum in the UK, but BIOT also provided a letter recognising that her life would be at risk if she was deported back to Sri Lanka.
Hamshika spent two months in Kigali’s military hospital being treated for her injuries. Then she and her father were moved to a two-room flat near a main road leading to the airport.
Their building was next to a courtyard with bars, and the nights were loud with music and drunk people talking and shouting.
After their flat was burgled twice, Hamshika’s father started moving the couch in front of the door every night to sleep there, fearing someone might try to break in again.
As the only Sri Lankans in the neighbourhood, they stood out and not everyone took kindly to them being there. Some locals would shout at them or make threats. Once, her father was attacked on the street when he went out to buy groceries with the small weekly allowance provided by BIOT.
Still, the two had their own space, running water and could cook for themselves. They were given phones and could call their family in Sri Lanka. But Hamshika says she still felt like she was living in an open-air prison.
In Diego Garcia, Hamshika was not allowed to claim asylum in the UK, but BIOT also provided a letter recognising that her life would be at risk if she was deported back to Sri Lanka.
Officially, Hamshika had been sent to Rwanda for medical treatment. But at the time, the UK also considered the country a viable destination for asylum seekers like Hamshika. The UK-Rwanda deal aimed to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda, where their applications would be processed and those granted refugee status would be allowed to stay there.
In Rwanda, locked in a state of limbo, without information about her future, Hamshika’s situation deteriorated. She says she was sexually abused by Rwandan nurses and refused to return to the hospital. When she reported the abuse and an attack on her father to the Rwandan police, she says her complaints were not taken seriously and she was told the experiences were “normal”.
During her treatment sessions for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) - diagnosed by medics in Diego Garcia and Rwanda - she felt the doctors were uninterested, telling her the time was up as she talked about her distress.
She was eventually readmitted to hospital after another suicide attempt in early 2024.
After family members contacted a UK law firm, Hamshika and other Tamil refugees detained in Diego Garcia received legal representation. Their lawyers argued that their detention was unlawful and that they should have been allowed to claim asylum in the UK.
In December 2024, more than three years after their detention on Diego Garcia, the BIOT Supreme Court ruled the asylum seekers were detained unlawfully in prison-like conditions. By then, the new Labour government had scrapped its Rwanda deportation scheme and agreed to transfer 61 refugees who remained in Diego Garcia and the eight in Rwanda to the UK while their asylum applications were considered. Most others detained in Diego Garcia had already been sent back to Sri Lanka or had sailed on. New arrivals to the Chagos Islands will now be deported home or sent to St Helena, a UK territory in the Atlantic Ocean.
On December 3, the Tamil refugees who were sent to Rwanda landed at London’s Heathrow Airport. They are now applying for asylum in the UK.
Since May, Hamshika and her father have been at a hotel on the outskirts of London with refugees of many different nationalities. Their six-month permission to stay and access to a 45-pound ($61) per week allowance have expired. They are now sharing a room and will wait for as long as it takes for their applications to be assessed. Their movements are curtailed - whenever they want to leave the building, they have to tell the hotel security where they are going.
Hamshika worries about her mother and sisters back home and says the police routinely stop by their house.
In the UK, she tries to think about her future. But she worries people will respond negatively if she tells them she is a refugee. "I tell people I'm a tourist," she says.
