A former prison officer has revealed exactly where it went wrong after a migrant sex offender was mistakenly released.
Ethiopian national Hadush Gerberslasie Kebatu was wrongfully let free on Friday after he was jailed for sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl.
The 38-year-old, who arrived in the UK on a small boat days before the incidents in July, told two teenagers he wanted to ‘have a baby with each of them’ and attempted to kiss them.
He was jailed 12 months in September, but hardly a month later he was accidentally released in what Prime Minister Keir Starmer described as a ‘totally unacceptable’ error.
The former prison officer, who has worked in the UK’s most notorious high-security units including HMP Frankland, told Metro that releasing the wrong prisoner is ‘the worst mistake any officer can make’.
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Following Kebatu mistaken release, Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy launched an immediate inquiry, and a member of prison staff was removed from duties.
However, the former prison officer who spoke to Metro, and asked to remain anonymous, said that there would have been at least 10 officers overseeing the release, and it should have been spotted long before his release form was signed.
‘There’s not just one point of failure and shouldn’t be put on the officer who was at the reception desk to release him.
‘The release plan is first communicated from the operations room, then to the managers on the wing, then to the officers who will get the prisoner and walk him to where he needs to be,’ he added.
‘There will also be officers in control rooms watching over it all on cameras – there’s just so many people he would have passed. But the person who would have signed the release box on reception is the final person who should have spotted it.’
The officer agreed that what caused the actual mistake would have been down to human error – explaining that incredibly it could have come down to cthe convist’s name being mispelled or the wrong file was grabbed. This would have then allowed Kebatu to simply walk out the door with the £76 discharge grant handed to him by the prison to cover his first week’s expenses.
He went on to say that HMP Chelmsford is notorious within the prison officer community of being ‘crowded but understaffed’ meaning it is hard to spot such serious errors.
‘It is a catergory B jail, there will be prisoners going in and out everyday for court dates and visits, and they are so understaffed,’ he said. ‘It is just part of a wider issue of prison funding.’
Follow Kebatu’s release, a delivery driver described seeing him return to HMP Chelmsford in a ‘very confused’ state ‘four or five times’, only to be turned away by prison staff and directed to the local railway station.
The driver, named only as Sim, told Sky News that he saw Kebatu come out of the prison saying ‘Where am I going? What am I doing?’.
He said that the sexual offender knew that he should be deported but the prison staff were ‘basically sending him away’ and saying to him ‘Go, you’ve been released, you go’.
Aaron Stow, president of the Criminal Justice Workers’ Union (CJWU), said Kebatu’s mistaken release was ‘a profound failure of duty’.
He said: ‘The release of Hadush Kebatu is a betrayal of the victims, the community and the principles of justice. We demand a full investigation and immediate reforms to ensure this never happens again.’
One enior justice source told the Daily Mail: ‘This is the mother of all f***-ups.’
In the 12 months to March this year, 262 prisoners were released in error in England and Wales, according to the prison service’s annual digest.
‘This is a 128% increase from 115 the previous year, and the highest in the time series,’ the report said.
‘Of the 262 releases in error, 233 of these releases in error occurred from prison establishments, while 29 were released in error at the courts.’
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