If I could live in peace and freedom in Afghanistan, I would have stayed

Feriba Ahmadi

Last March, Mrs Ahmadi told BBC News Online: "If I could live in peace and freedom in Afghanistan, I would have stayed but I don't feel safe there."

The couple were both born in Kabul, but when the Taleban came to power six years ago their lives changed.

Mrs Ahmadi, who was just 18 at the time, had harboured plans to go to university and become a doctor.

But under the Taleban regime she was forbidden from studying.

Mr Ahmadi, a qualified mechanic, owned his own business but was constantly harassed by the Taleban for money and cars.

Desperate escape

Twice he was held captive and tortured.

The first time he was beaten with a rubber hose, the second time, electrodes were attached to his feet and he was given electric shocks.

The Ahmadis fled war-torn Kabul

Decades of war have also taken their toll on the couple's family.

Mr Ahmadi lost two brothers and a sister when a rocket hit his father's house and Mrs Ahmadi's brother-in-law was killed in bombing raids.

After the couple's children, Hadia, now 6, and Seear, 4, were born, they wanted to raise them in safety.

The couple's desperation to escape from Kabul meant a drive over the border to Pakistan with their two young children.

Once there, they paid "lots of money" to a Pakistani contact who said he could get them to England, they ended up in Kiev and were eventually put on a train to Germany with no passports.

The family spent ten months in detention centres in Germany in what they described as "cramped, over-crowded conditions".

They eventually arrived in Dover smuggled in the back of a lorry.