Sentenced to prison for sexual assault, events that sparked a series of anti-immigration demonstrations in the United Kingdom this summer, an Ethiopian asylum seeker was mistakenly released, the Minister of Justice reported this Friday, October 24.
The minister, David Lammy, declared himself “dismayed” by this error and added that his services were working “with the police urgently to find it.”
According to The Sun newspaper, Hadush Kebatu was going to be transferred from Chelmsford prison, in Essex (southeast England), to an administrative detention center with a view to his deportation, but the authorities accidentally released him. A prison officer has been suspended, according to the British agency PA.
“Kebatu must be deported for his crimes and not end up on our streets,” added David Lammy, who ordered an investigation into this mistaken release.
It arrived in the UK at the end of June.
The asylum seeker was sentenced in September to a year in prison by British courts for sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl and a woman in Epping, northeast of London.
Following his arrest in July, protests, some marked by violence, were organized outside the Bell Hotel in Epping, where he stayed with 130 other asylum seekers, before spreading to other cities in the UK.
Hadush Kebatu arrived in the United Kingdom at the end of June crossing the English Channel aboard a small boat.
“Britain is collapsing,” Nigel Farage, leader of the far-right Reform UK party, who has made the fight against immigration his main electoral argument, reacted on Friday in X.
Source: BFM TV
