Ministers warned not to scapegoat prison staff over sex offender case

Questions over 'unjust' suspension of manager after asylum seeker error

- Rajeev Syal Home affairs editor

Ministers have been warned against scapegoating prison staff as they struggle to contain the fallout of the mistaken release of an asylum seeker who sexually assaulted a girl.

As David Lammy, the justice secretary, announced an inquiry and blamed “human error” for the accidental freeing of Hadush Kebatu from HMP Chelmsford, the Prison Officers’ Association (POA) questioned yesterday why a single member of staff had been “unjustly” suspended.

Charlie Taylor, the chief inspector of prisons, also warned that it would be “very easy to throw an individual at Chelmsford under the bus for this” when it was a systemic problem.

After Lammy said that a stringent new inventory would be introduced to stop further mistakes at release, governors warned that “a check list won't cut it”.

The former Metropolitan police deputy commissioner Dame Lynne Owens will chair the inquiry into why the Ethiopian national was freed on Friday morning instead of being sent to an immigration detention centre.

Kebatu, who had been living at the Bell hotel in Epping, Essex, when he sexually assaulted a 14-year-old girl, travelled to London after his release and was arrested on Sunday morning in Finsbury Park, north London, after a two-day manhunt.

He was set for deportation under an early removals scheme (ERS) for foreign national offenders, but was released into the community in “what appears to have been human error”, Lammy told MPs.

Mark Fairhurst, the national chair of the POA, said that a union member, a discharging manager, was the only person to have been suspended when at least two other more senior staff members were involved in freeing Kebatu.