The lethal naivety of Britain’s asylum system

An asylum seeker from Sudan was today found guilty of murdering a woman who worked at his asylum hotel, in England’s West Midlands.

In October last year, Deng Majek was seen on CCTV waiting for Rhiannon Whyte to finish her shift at the Park Inn hotel in Walsall. He followed Whyte to the station, approached her on the platform and proceeded to stab her 23 times with a screwdriver. Eleven strikes penetrated her skull. Video tapes presented to the jury during his trial showed Majek running from the scene, throwing the victim’s phone into the river, popping into a local shop to buy a drink, then returning to his hotel in high spirits. Whyte died three days later.

Majek was ‘clearly excited about what he had done’, argued prosecutor Michelle Heeley KC, in reference to videos of him ‘dancing and laughing’ at the hotel following the attack. None of Whyte’s co-workers could recall any issues that might have motivated this ‘vicious and frenzied’ stabbing. She had only worked at the hotel for a few months. Her job involved cleaning and serving food. ‘There had been an issue about some broken biscuits with some of the residents, but nothing serious’, said Heeley.

Now that the trial is over, it has become clear that Whyte’s murder was merely the tip of the iceberg. Chris Durham, who worked as a housing officer for Serco, revealed that migrant tenants harassing and stalking female staff members was a regular occurrence at the Park Inn Hotel. ‘A few of them followed hotel staff on the bus journeys home’, he said. Before Whyte’s murder, another female staff member had been followed on to her bus by a resident who ‘kept badgering her wouldn’t leave her alone’. According to Durham, ‘she reported it to Serco but nothing came of it’. He also added that a significant number of the residents were ‘unstable and withdrawn… They wouldn’t take no for an answer from the female staff.’ During the trial, other hotel workers described Majek specifically as a ‘loner’.

According to another anonymous housing officer, a number of the migrants had arrived at the hotel with ‘dozens of reports against their name’. ‘Some made threats to kill, to blow up the hotel, that they had a bomb in their bag’, said Durham. West Midlands Police were regularly called to deal with incidents on the premises. Weapons such as zombie knives and axes were discovered in residents’ rooms, but could not be removed from what were technically classed as the residents’ ‘homes’.

Tragically, violent incidents connected to the asylum system are no longer a rarity. This is surely to be expected when seemingly limitless men are welcomed into the system, with minimal or often zero vetting. This doesn’t just affect local communities, but also those who work with asylum seekers – and even asylum seekers themselves.

The list of horrific incidents is constantly growing. In October 2023, Ahmed Alid from Morocco stabbed a passing 70-year-old man to death in Hartlepool ‘in protest against Israel and the Gaza conflict’. This was after Alid had tried and failed to murder his Iranian housemate, a fellow asylum seeker, while he slept. Previous reports of his threatening behaviour had been dismissed by police.

In 2022, Eritrean Esayas Neguse knifed his 71-year-old lawyer in the chest and hand during a meeting. Neguse had recently been released early from a 12-month jail term for being abusive towards police officers, and had 11 previous convictions.

In the same year, Afghan fugitive Lawangeen Abdulrahimzai stabbed and killed a 21-year-old man outside a Dorset takeaway. When he arrived illegally in the UK in 2019, he immediately sought asylum. Posing as a minor, he was even placed in the foster-care system, despite his carer’s suspicions about his age. More extensive background checks would not only have revealed he was an adult, but also that he had murdered two people with a Kalashnikov rifle in Serbia.

In 2020, Sudanese asylum seeker Badreddin Abdalla Adam Bosh stabbed three fellow asylum seekers, two hotel workers and a police officer at a hotel in Glasgow, having made threats to do so 24 hours prior. Those threats, predictably, went ignored.

The tragedy of these cases is compounded by the fact that they were all entirely preventable. None of these men would be in the UK at all if they weren’t able to take advantage of our dysfunctional asylum system. Background checks were either deficient, or not carried out at all. Warnings about their behaviour, even after their arrival, were routinely ignored by the authorities.

It should go without saying that most asylum seekers are not criminals. But when a country consistently shows it is incapable of saying ‘no’ to any newcomer, and doesn’t even bother with basic vetting, this makes it more and more likely to attract those who are indeed dangerous. In these instances, society’s most vulnerable – especially children, the elderly or women – are the ones who bear the brunt.

Rhiannon Whyte ‘always saw the good in everyone’, her sister said following her death. This is a commendable trait. But if the British state is ever going to fulfil its duty to protect its citizens, then someone higher up the chain is going to have to start recognising the bad in some people, too.

Georgina Mumford is an editorial assistant at spiked.