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A convicted sex offender who was released from prison by mistake a week ago is back in custody.
Brahim Kaddour-Cherif, 24, from Algeria, was accidentally freed on 29 October from Wandsworth prison in south London. He was arrested in Finsbury Park on Friday, the Metropolitan police said.
A manhunt for Kaddour-Cherif, who also has convictions for theft, was launched by the Met. The force expressed frustration that he had had a “six-day head start” because the mistake was only reported to the Met a week later, on 4 November.
The erroneous release, and that of another prisoner who was mistakenly freed, has led to mounting political pressure on David Lammy, the UK justice secretary, days after he introduced stringent checks for jails.
Lammy had refused several times to say whether any more prisoners had been released in error in a bruising session of prime minister’s questions (PMQs) on Wednesday, having been ambushed with a string of pre-planned questions.
The moment that Kaddour-Cherif was detained appears to have been captured by a Sky News camera crew in Finsbury Park, north London, at 11.30am, where a man initially claimed to be someone else.
Police officers then approached him and put him into the back of a police van after telling him he was under arrest “on suspicion of being wanted after being falsely released from prison”.
When he initially denied being Kaddour-Cherif, the arresting officer told him he “looked exactly” like him and had a “very distinctive wonky nose”.
Police brought him to the back of the van and held up an image of Kaddour-Cherif next to his face before uncuffing and recuffing his hands behind his back. Officers searched his backpack and found a laptop, umbrella and wallet.
Before he was put in the back of the van, Kaddour-Cherif turned to those gathered and said: “Look at the justice of the UK, they release people by mistake, after this they ‘ah ah ah’ … it’s not my fucking fault.”
Kaddour-Cherif was identified as an overstayer five years ago, but had not been removed from the UK. When he was mistakenly freed from prison, he had been serving a sentence for trespass with intent to steal.
He was convicted for indecent exposure in November 2024, when he was given an 18-month community order and placed on the sex offender register for five years.
It is understood Kaddour-Cherif has not applied for asylum and was in the initial stages of being deported for overstaying his visa when he was let out.
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He entered the UK on a visitor visa in 2019, but was flagged as an automatic case of having overstayed on 6 February 2020.
According to the Met, Kaddour-Cherif uses other variations of his first name, including Ibrahim, and has links to Westminster and Tower Hamlets.
Lammy said in a statement: “I can confirm Brahim Kaddour-Cherif has been recaptured and is back in custody. My thanks are with the police and staff at HMPPS who have been working around the clock.
“We inherited a prison system in crisis and I’m appalled at the rate of releases in error this is causing. I’m determined to grip this problem, but there is a mountain to climb which cannot be done overnight.
The other prisoner who was mistakenly released, a fraudster, handed himself back in on Thursday. While Lammy insisted the government would clampdown on clerical errors, William Smith was filmed waving to cameras and hugging his partner before he walked back into HMP Wandsworth, in south-west London.
Smith, 35, usually known as Billy, had been sentenced to 45 months for multiple fraud offences at Croydon crown court on Monday, but was then released in error by the prison.
A clerical mistake by the court led to the prison being told it was a suspended sentence, which meant he no longer had to be detained. The court corrected the error but HMP Wandsworth was not informed.
