Armed police officer in central London, UK, on March 22, 2017.Image: EPA/EPA
November 5, 2025, 7:13 p.mNovember 5, 2025, 7:13 p.m
British police are once again searching for a foreign criminal who was mistakenly released from prison. The 24-year-old Algerian has been free since last Wednesday, the Metropolitan Police told the BBC.
According to Sky broadcaster, the offender was in custody for trespassing. In 2024 he was sentenced to a suspended sentence with a community service requirement for exhibitionism and was entered on the sex offenders register for five years, the police told the PA news agency. According to the BBC, he entered the UK legally on a visa in 2019 and is in the early stages of deportation proceedings.
Just days earlier, authorities had admitted that a sex offender had been accidentally released from prison instead of deported. This breakdown also triggered a major manhunt. The 38-year-old man from Ethiopia was caught and deported last week.
This is by no means the first judicial breakdown
The case caused a great stir because immigration opponents used the man’s crime – the sexual assault on a 14-year-old – to spark weeks of, sometimes violent, protests in front of asylum seekers’ accommodation. It also became clear again what the conditions are like in the sometimes hopelessly overcrowded prisons in Great Britain.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer had ordered an investigation “to find out what went wrong”. As the PA news agency recently reported, citing official information, 262 prisoners were mistakenly released in England and Wales alone in the twelve months up to March this year – almost 130 percent more than in the previous twelve months. (sda/dpa)