Recaptured sex offender to be deported 'in days'

DOWNING Street has insisted an asylum-seeker who sexually assaulted a teenage girl and was mistakenly freed from prison will be deported “imminently”.

- PRESS ASSOCIATION REPORTERS

Ethiopian national Hadush Kebatu was wrongly released from HMP Chelmsford last Friday morning instead of being sent to an immigration detention centre.

The migrant, who had been living at the Bell Hotel in Epping, Essex, when he sexually assaulted a 14-year-old girl and a woman, later travelled to London and was arrested on Sunday morning in Finsbury Park.

The father of Kebatu’s teenage victim had said he hopes the sex offender will be “deported immediately’.

Asked yesterday when Kebatu would be removed from the country, the Prime Minister's official spokesperson said “you have us on record from this morning that we expect that to happen imminently’ and suggested that would be within a few days.

He said prison release errors “are never acceptable” and “this is another symptom of the justice system crisis inherited by this government having suffered cuts to staffing, failure to build prison places’ and “chronic under-investment”.