The manhunt for the Epping sex offender shames the British state

It took staff at HMP Chelmsford more than an hour to realise their blunder. The most notorious sex offender in Britain – an Ethiopian migrant convicted of sexually assaulting a teenager – had just been accidentally released on to the streets. At around 11.30am on Friday, instead of being sent to an immigration facility, where he would then be deported to his home country, he was let out of prison and sent on his merry way. The manhunt is ongoing.

‘The mother of all fuck-ups’ is how one official described it. Indeed, it would have been damning enough had Hadush Kebatu simply absconded – that alone would have raised alarm bells about the British state’s capacity to keep us all safe. But no. Kebatu was actually processed by a prison officer, who mistakenly believed he was due to be released on licence. He was even handed a £76 discharge payment, some of which he will have used to hop on a train to London, where the Metropolitan Police are still searching for him.

Even if we accept this was a mere administrative error, a fat-fingered accident, it is just the latest in a very long line of errors, failures and treachery by the British state that brought us to this point. After all, Kebatu should never have set foot on British soil in the first place. Within days of arriving illegally on a small boat, he managed to sexually assault a 14-year-old girl and an adult woman who came to her aid. His crimes sparked a summer of protests in Epping, outside the Bell Hotel, where he and other migrants were being housed. They also sparked court battles as the local council fought in vain to have the hotel shut down on public-safety grounds. For the past few months, Kebatu has arguably been the sinister face of the small-boats crisis. It seems almost inconceivable that anyone working in the British criminal-justice system would not know who this man is or that he was due to be deported rather than released.

If incompetence was the cause, then this shoddiness was surely born of the British state’s indifference. An indifference to public safety. An indifference to policing the border. And it’s an indifference that stretches right to the top of government. Kebatu’s enablers can be found all over Whitehall.

It is all too telling that, back in August, not long after a second Bell Hotel resident was arrested on suspicion of sexual assault, the UK government went to the Court of Appeal to challenge a lower court’s decision to shut the hotel down. The Home Office’s case was essentially that the rights of men like Kebatu, who arrived in the UK about 30 seconds ago, should count for more than the safety of the general public. The British state’s primary duty, in the Labour government’s eyes, is to ensure the wellbeing and comfort of illegal migrants, regardless of how this might impact our own citizens.

That Kebatu was due to be deported at all is itself nothing short of a miracle these days. Hardened criminals are routinely granted asylum in the UK on the most spurious grounds imaginable, usually with the aid of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). An Afghan man convicted for flashing was able to claim his ‘sexually disinhibited behaviour’ would put him at risk in his own country, thus violating his ECHR Article 3 right to avoid torture or degrading treatment. An Albanian gangster was able to use his Article 8 right to family life, as his son did not like ‘foreign chicken nuggets’. Yet even as these perverse cases pile up, the Labour government remains steadfastly committed to the UK’s ECHR membership. It is the only major question of our time that Keir Starmer hasn’t flip-flopped on. Worse, Starmer’s attorney general has explicitly likened critics of the convention to Nazis.

You do not have to be a nativist to recognise that welcoming tens of thousands of undocumented, unvetted men, and then dispersing them in communities across the UK, might pose something of a risk. Indeed, many who arrive on a small boat are not really escaping oppression or persecution, but are evading criminal justice. We were reminded of this last week, when Afghan Fayaz Khan was jailed for threatening to kill Nigel Farage. Before journeying to the UK, Khan lived in Sweden, where he had racked up convictions for 17 offences on 12 separate occasions.

The British state’s approach to asylum now poses a lethal threat to its citizens. This week, Sudanese migrant Deng Majek was found guilty of murdering Rhiannon White, a worker at his asylum hotel in Walsall. In October, he followed her after work to the train station and stabbed her 23 times with a screwdriver. She died three days later.

Since Majek’s trial, it has emerged that he wasn’t the only resident to follow a female hotel worker home. Some of his fellow migrants at the Park Inn Hotel had ‘dozens of reports against them’ for crimes before arriving. Once housed there, some ‘made threats to kill, to blow up the hotel, that they had a bomb in their bag’. Weapons, including axes and zombie knives, were discovered by police in some of the rooms, but they were not confiscated. According to one of the housing officers, ‘One man had this big Rambo knife in his room. He was constantly losing his temper and threatening everybody.’ No action was taken. Having failed to prevent illegal migrants from entering the country, and showing no interest in deporting them once they have arrived, the authorities seem content to ignore any glaring red flags.

A toxic combination of naivety, virtue-signalling and rank incompetence has brought us to this point. The British state now seems incapable – unwilling even – to do what is necessary to keep the public safe. A notorious sex offender is now on the run. The blame cannot rest with one hapless prison officer. The rot runs all the way to the top.

Fraser Myers is deputy editor at spiked and host of the spiked podcast. Follow him on X: @FraserMyers.