The immigrant who sexually assaulted two women, one of them only fourteen years old, in the English town of Epping and this Friday became a case of embarrassment for Keir Starmer’s Government. Hadush Gerberslasie Kebatu, a 41-year-old Ethiopian who lived in the hotel for asylum seekers in that city – one of 210 establishments throughout the country, housing 32,000 people – was sentenced by a court in Chelmsford to twelve months in prison and a five-year restraining order from any woman. An official’s error led to Kebatu being released, as has now been known. The police have deployed an entire search effort to try to correct the error, which has sparked a new political fray.
The Prison Service has opened an investigation into what happened, and the officer has been suspended.
During the trial, there were altercations with the police, violence and almost three dozen arrests.
The Minister of Justice, as reported by several British media, has been furious about the error and has demanded that all necessary means be used to locate the fugitive. “Kebatu must be deported for the crimes he has committed, he cannot be on our streets,” he wrote on X. Prime Minister Keir Starmer has used the same social network to vent his frustration. “I am shocked by what has happened, which is already being investigated. The police are working urgently to track him down, and my Government supports them. This man must be arrested and deported for his crimes,” Starmer demanded.
The conservative opposition has charged against the Government with apocalyptic messages. “The whole system is collapsing under the Labor mandate,” said the leader tory Kemi Badenoch. “We Conservatives voted against Labour’s early prison release program because it returned sexual predators to our streets,” he added in X. “But this man had just been convicted. The level of incompetence is incredible.”
Farage has limited himself to sending a resounding message to his people: “He is already walking [el fugitivo] through the streets of Essex. “The UK is a broken country.”
The latest police information has located Kebatu on a train bound for London this Friday at 12:41 (1:41 p.m., Spanish peninsular time).
“We understand the concern of citizens regarding this situation and I assure you that we already have officers working urgently to locate and arrest him,” said a spokesperson for the Essex police, in charge of the area where the escape occurred.
Kebatu was arrested in August, eight days after arriving in the UK on a small boat. He had paid 1,800 euros for the trip across the English Channel, in an inflatable boat. His conviction coincided with the approval of a legal change that allowed the deportation of an immigrant sex offender after serving 30% of the sentence. However, Ethiopia has not agreed on a deportation plan with the British Government, and the processing of Kebatu’s was delayed a few days.
The episode, which has brought out the colors of , compared to the erratic policy of previous conservative mandates, occurs days after another embarrassing situation, when an immigrant of Iranian origin who had been returned to France, under the new agreement closed between the two countries, returned to the United Kingdom on a boat just a month later.
