Sex offender wrongly released from UK prison re-arrested after manhunt

London — A convicted sex offender who was released by mistake early from a London prison was arrested again on Friday after more than a week of freedom, police said.

Brahim Kaddour-Cherif was one of two men accidentally released from Wandsworth prison over the past two weeks, causing a political headache for the government and focusing renewed attention on an overcrowded and overwhelmed prison system.

The other inmate, Billy Smith, 35, who was sentenced to nearly four years for fraud and accidentally released on the same day as Cherif, turned himself in Thursday at the Victorian-era lockup.

Cherif, 24, a registered sex offender due to a previous conviction for indecent exposure, was serving time for breaking and entering with intent to rob. The Algerian national who overstayed a legal visit to the UK in 2019 was in the initial stages of deportation when he was allowed to leave prison on Monday.

He was detained by police in north London in an arrest filmed by national broadcaster Sky News. He initially denied being the man they were looking for, but later said it was not his fault he was on the street.

“I’m not Brahim, brother,” he initially told a police officer, who said he recognized his distinctive nose. “Everyone knows him, he’s on the news,” Cherif said.

After police officers took out their phones to look at the photo of the wanted man, he effectively admitted that he was Cherif.

“It’s not my fault,” Cherif said. “They released me illegally.”

Both men were mistakenly freed from Wandsworth, a building built in the mid-19th century in southwest London that was already under scrutiny after another prisoner escaped two years ago clinging to the bottom of a food delivery truck.

The inadvertent releases followed tighter security checks that were supposed to be implemented after an asylum seeker who inspired a surge in anti-immigrant protests was mistakenly released from Chelmsford prison, east London, on October 24.

Prison bosses were called to a meeting on Thursday to discuss the errors and said efforts were being made to update a system that still uses paper prison records.

The mistaken releases have become a source of heated debate and a political liability for the Labor government after being a thorn in the side of its Conservative predecessors.

According to government figures, 262 prisoners were wrongfully released in the year ending March 2025, an increase of 128% on the previous 12-month period.

The Conservatives say the Labor government is to blame for a policy of releasing some inmates early to ensure prisons do not exceed capacity.

But the Labor Party has blamed 14 years of Conservative government and years of austerity that have starved the Prison Service of resources.

“We inherited a prison system in crisis and I am appalled by the rate of wrongful releases this is causing,” Justice Secretary David Lammy said after the arrest. “I am determined to tackle this problem, but there is a mountain to climb that cannot be done overnight.”

An official review of the issue has begun, but Ian Acheson, a former prisons governor and adviser to UK government ministers, cited overcrowding in British prisons as one of the reasons for the rise in accidental releases.

Overcrowding has put more pressure on prison administrators to remove offenders as quickly as possible, leading to increased movement of prisoners within the prison system, Acheson told the Telegraph newspaper.

“It’s very possible that one of the reasons for the increase in these errors has been the pressure and imperative to get people out,” Acheson told the Telegraph.