British police are searching for two inmates who were mistakenly released from a London prison last week, just days after a similar blunder.
One of the prisoners, a 24-year-old Algerian, was accidentally released from Wandsworth Prison in south London on Thursday 29 October. He had been sentenced in November last year to 18 months of community service for sexual assault and is on the sex offenders register. Authorities are still trying to track him down.
The UK’s Home Office confirmed the man was not an asylum seeker. He entered the country in 2019 on a tourist visa, which has since expired, and deportation proceedings were already underway.
Later in the day, police issued a search notice for another inmate, William Smith, who was mistakenly freed from the same prison on Monday. Smith was serving a 45-month sentence for fraud.
Less than two weeks earlier, an Ethiopian asylum seeker was also wrongly released. He had sexually assaulted a woman and a 14-year-old girl in July, days after arriving in the UK on a small boat. Convicted in September and sentenced to a year in prison, he was serving time at Chelmsford Prison, northeast of London.
The man has since been found and deported to Ethiopia.
Mistaken prisoner releases in the UK have doubled in the year leading up to March 2025.
