Two prisoners still at large after being freed by mistake in 2024

Two prisoners are still at large after being mistakenly freed last year, the BBC understands.

Another two, who were set free in error in June 2025, also remain missing.

Details of the four erroneously released prisoners are emerging as ministers face growing pressure over a number of high-profile mistaken releases.

Two other men who were released in error from HMP Wandsworth are now back in custody after high-profile police manhunts this week, after a migrant sex offender was mistakenly set free in late October.

Algerian sex offender Brahim Kaddour-Cherif was arrested on Friday, while William Smith handed himself back in at the south London prison on Thursday.

Hadush Kebatu, who arrived in the UK on a small boat and was jailed for sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl and a woman while living in an asylum hotel, was mistakenly released from HMP Chelmsford in Essex. He was subsequently recaptured and deported.

Some 262 prisoners in England and Wales mistakenly freed in the year to March - up from 115 the previous year.

The names of the four still missing, as well as why they were imprisoned and the reason for their mistaken release, remain unclear.

A Ministry of Justice (MoJ) spokesperson told the BBC: "The vast majority of offenders released by mistake are quickly brought back to prison, and we will do everything we can to work with the police to capture the few still in the community."

Earlier, shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick had said the unaccounted prisoners revealed "the incompetence of this government".

"It shouldn't be left to reporters to uncover the facts. [Justice Secretary] David Lammy must finally come clean about how many prisoners have been accidentally released and how many are still at large."

Liberal Democrats spokeswoman Jess Brown-Fuller said "every resource" must go into finding the prisoners, describing the situation as "a disgrace and an omnishambles".

The revelation that four wrongly released prisoners remain at large comes just hours after Kaddour-Cherif was arrested following his erroneous release from HMP Wandsworth, in south London, on 29 October.

The Algerian national was spotted by a member of the public in the Finsbury Park area of north London shortly before 11:30 GMT, and captured by police just a three-minute walk from where Kebatu had been re-arrested less than a week prior.

Kaddour-Cherif had been convicted of indecent exposure in November 2024 in relation to an incident in March of that year, given an 18-month community order and placed on the sex offenders' register for five years.

He is understood to have overstayed his visitor's visa to the UK after arriving in 2019, and was in the initial stages of the deportation process.

He was released the day after being found not guilty of breaching the sex offenders' register's requirements - but was still facing other charges and should have remained in custody. Police said they were not told for several days.

Smith handed himself back in on Thursday. He had been let go on Monday, having been sentenced to 45 months for multiple fraud offences at Croydon Crown Court earlier that day.

The BBC understands he was released as a result of a clerical error at court level - with a suspended sentence entered into the computer system instead of a custodial sentence. A correction was made, but sent to the wrong person.

Since coming to power last year, the government has adopted a policy of releasing some offenders earlier in their sentence to ease overcrowding.

But this appears to have affected the number of prisoners let go by mistake.

Lammy said on Friday that the government "inherited a prison system in crisis" and said he was personally "appalled at the rate of releases in error this is causing".

He continued: "I'm determined to grip this problem, but there is a mountain to climb which cannot be done overnight.

"That is why I have ordered new tough release checks, commissioned an independent investigation into systemic failures, and begun overhauling archaic paper-based systems still used in some prisons."

Correction 8 November 2025: An earlier version of this article said a prisoner had been mistakenly released in March 2024, under the previous Conservative government. Following publication, the BBC was told the release happened at a later, unspecified date in 2024 so these details were removed from the story.