A British family stranded in the Middle East after being wrongly refused entry to an evacuation flight from Oman say they have received an apology from the Foreign Office, but no actual help to get home.
Nusaybah Sattar, 26, from London, was in Dubai with her family to celebrate her brother-in-law’s 40th birthday when the city was hit by Iranian drones and missiles last Saturday.
Sattar said she heard bangs earlier in the day but thought it was construction work. “It just hit home – the reality that it could happen anywhere,” she said.
When they realised the truth, the family left the country, making an eight-hour drive to Oman. There, they registered their presence with the UK government and were informed of a charter flight to London being organised for British nationals by the Foreign Office.
The family of six paid more than £1,700 for tickets, but when they tried to board the flight on Wednesday, Foreign Office ground workers said that most of them had not been approved to do so.
They later found out that Sattar’s 19-month-old toddler and her 84-year-old grandmother-in-law, who uses a wheelchair, were the only ones cleared to board.
“Those two are the most vulnerable of our group and they need carers. They can’t just go on a flight by themselves,” Sattar said.
Sattar’s husband contacted the Home Office, which said they did not have the correct visas to enter the United Kingdom. Every member of the family is a British national and had their UK passports in hand while attempting to board the plane.
Sattar was also told there was an issue with how her name appeared in the system because she had a different surname before marriage.
“If we had English names, I don’t think there would have have been an issue,” she said. “There were other families there that weren’t of our background and it was much for easier for them to get on to the flight.”
With half an hour to go before the plane was due to take off, the family had to concede that none of them would be able to board.
The flight, which was the first chartered to take British nationals back to the UK from the Middle East since the US and Israel launched strikes against Iran, was ultimately delayed until Thursday.
The flight was part of a wider evacuation effort that the UK prime minister, Keir Starmer, has called “one of the biggest of its kind” but it still departed without Sattar’s family onboard.
More than 140,000 Britons have registered their presence in the Middle East with the Foreign Office, but MPs and British nationals in the Middle East have criticised the pace and scale of the evacuation effort.
Airspace over the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and much of the surrounding area was initially suspended after Iranian strikes targeted Dubai and other major cities in the region, and has since opened up in a very limited capacity.
The Foreign Office later told Sattar’s mother that the family had all been cleared to board but, according to its records, had not arrived at the airport.
“There’s so many different things that they’ve been saying to everyone and none of it is actually true. It’s so completely disorganised,” Sattar said.
She added that several Foreign Office staff members have since called her and her family to apologise but have failed to offer any further help.
On Thursday night the Foreign Office crisis team was still unable to tell the family whether a further charter flight would be leaving Oman, so Sattar and her family made the eight-hour journey back to Dubai to stay with her brother-in-law.
However, on Friday morning, she was told another evacuation flight would depart from Oman later that day – one she would no longer be able to reach.
Sattar said she no longer has the “physical or financial resources” to make another journey to Oman, having so far spent just under £4,000 on tickets for the charter flight, hotels in Oman, and transport from and back to Dubai. She added that taxis were charging £1,000 per person to flee Dubai for Oman.
She said that her disabled grandmother, a stroke patient who suffers from serious back problems, had now run out of essential medication, and that the Foreign Office, despite being at fault, told her it was “not willing to do anything to help us get back”.
She is now pleading with the Home Office to organise her family’s safe transport from Dubai back to Oman and accommodation until the next available evacuation flight, or to secure them seats on a charter plane out of the UAE.
“I used to think that the British Embassy was this big deal. If you needed help to get back safely to the UK, they’d be willing to do that,” she said. “It doesn’t matter if you have a certain name. You are a British national and you’ll come back safely. It’s just shocking that this has even happened.”
The Foreign Office and Home Office were contacted for comment.
