UK police on Sunday arrested an Ethiopian asylum seeker and convicted sex offender, whose crimes had sparked anti-immigration protests, after he was accidentally released from prison in an embarrassing blunder by officials.

London's Metropolitan Police said officers arrested Hadush Kebatu in the north of the capital nearly 48 hours after he was mistakenly freed.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer said Kebatu would now be deported.

"We have ordered an investigation to establish what went wrong. We must make sure this doesn't happen again," he added on X.

Kebatu, 38, had served the first month of a one-year sentence for sexually assaulting a teenage girl and a woman, and was reportedly due to be deported when the Prison Service error occurred Friday.

His high-profile case earlier this year in Epping, northeast of London, sparked demonstrations in various English towns and cities where asylum seekers were believed to be housed, as well as counter-protests.

The Metropolitan Police said it received a tip-off he was at a bus stop in London's Finsbury Park neighbourhood, and officers found him inside that park. He was arrested for "being unlawfully at large".

The Telegraph newspaper said Kebatu had wrongly been categorised for release on licence and handed £76 as a discharge grant.

Police had appealed on Saturday for Kebatu to turn himself in, after reports emerged that he had appeared confused and reluctant to leave the prison in Chelmsford, eastern England.

A delivery driver described seeing Kebatu return several times in a "very confused" state, only to be turned away by staff and directed to the railway station.

The driver told Sky News he saw Kebatu outside the jail, asking "where am I going? What am I doing?"

"He was starting to get upset, he was getting stressed," the driver said.

The father of Kebatu's anonymous teenage victim told the broadcaster that, with the Ethiopian's mistaken release, "the justice system has let us down".

Police originally arrested the asylum seeker in July after he repeatedly tried to kiss a 14-year-old girl and touch her legs, and made sexually explicit comments to her.

He also sexually assaulted an adult woman, placing a hand on her thigh, when she intervened to stop his interactions with the girl.

He was staying at the time at Epping's Bell Hotel, where scores of other asylum seekers have been accommodated, and which became the target of repeated protests.

RTHK's UK correspondent, Gavin Grey, said that the issue of migrants has become a "fraught political hot potato", after nearly 30,000 people have crossed the English Channel illegally so far this calendar year.

"That is slightly higher than the preceding year when the government came to power and promised to smash the gangs, to get the people smugglers in prison, would prevent them from ferrying people across from France to the UK," he told Hong Kong Today.

"That's why this individual was so symptomatic of so much frustration.

"And then for him to be released accidentally, well, that really just was another step that I think many people think, 'Do you know what? It's not just our asylum system that's broken'.

"Now it would even appear the judicial system and the prison systems are both bust too." (AFP/RTHK)
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Last updated: 2025-10-27 HKT 09:30