British police are searching for two prisoners who were mistakenly released from a London jail.
London police say a 24-year-old Algerian man was released from Wandsworth Prison at the end of October. It took six days for the corrections service to report the incident to police.
Surrey Police later appealed for the public’s help in finding another prisoner who was wrongly released from the same prison on Monday.
This comes after just a few weeks ago British police searched for three days for wrongly released illegal Ethiopian immigrant Hadusha Kebatu, who was arrested for stalking a 14-year-old girl and an adult woman while staying at a refugee hotel in Epping, Essex.
Kebatu was rearrested on 26 October in the Finsbury Park area of north London and deported to Ethiopia.
Authorities apologised for his false release and promised to urgently strengthen the prison system to prevent this from happening again, as well as launching an investigation into the event.
London police confirmed media reports that the first man had been mistakenly released from Jen Prison for indecent behaviour committed in March that year. The court sentenced him to 18 months community service and placed him on the sex offenders’ register for five years.”
On 9 September, the sheriff was arrested again after police officers noticed he was wanted on an arrest warrant for failing to appear in court, failing to comply with parole conditions and violating the requirements of being placed on the sex offender registry.
“It’s been a little over a day since we learned of the sheriff’s release. We immediately launched a search and are now continuing with urgent investigative action.”
London police chief Paul Travers, who is overseeing the investigation, appealed for the public’s help in finding the offender.
“To make the search easier we have publicised and the prisoner – 35-year-old William Smith, also known as Billy – was released on Monday after a trial that sentenced him to almost four years in prison for several episodes of fraud.
According to the BBC, William Smith was dismissed due to a clerical error. Instead of the actual prison term imposed on him, the system showed a suspended sentence. The court noticed and corrected the error, but the correction message was sent to the wrong recipient.
Is the number of errors increasing?
The number of prisoners in the UK released by mistake has more than doubled since last year.
According to government figures, 262 prisoners in England and Wales were wrongly released in England and Wales in the year to March 2025.
This is 128 per cent more than the 115 prisoners who were wrongly released in the year to March 2024, according to the Prison Service’s annual report.
Of the 262 people released in error, 233 were released from prison and 29 were released in error by the courts.
Justice Committee Chairman Andy Slaughter said many of the problems in the prison system are “systemic.”
Slaughter said “this is a problem that this government needs to address” but added that he was “not sure” whether the problems were caused by this government because they had been building up over a long period of time.