Image Credit: Dan Kitwood / Staff / Getty 
Britain’s migrant crisis took a (more) sinister turn on Friday, October 24th when two separate high-profile cases culminated in grim and absurd ways, staining the criminal justice system.
Firstly, Sudanese national Deng Chol Majek was found guilty of the murder of asylum hotel worker Rhiannon Whyte, 27. Majek followed the mother-of-one to Bescot Stadium railway station in Walsall, West Midlands following the end of her shift, where he stabbed her 23 times with a screwdriver, piercing her brainstem. She died in hospital three days later.
Majek was convicted on a mixture of forensic, CCTV and eyewitness evidence, noting reports that he performed a dance in celebration of the stabbing. Sentencing is delayed, partly while the killer’s true age is ascertained: having been recorded as 27 years old during an earlier failed asylum application in Germany, he now says he’s 19. Majek’s defence claims—where he denied recognising Whyte, despite CCTV footage of him staring at her in the hotel lobby—shows his testimony is unreliable.
The murder, committed by an unvetted male who arrived in Britain by small boat, was linked to a pattern of chaos at the Park Inn hotel, where reportedly residents keep knives and axes in their rooms—and harass local women, prompting multiple police call-outs.
Barely had the jury in Wolverhampton reached its verdict when another human symptom of the UK migrant crisis came screeching back into the headlines. In a “human error,” the best-known sexual predator at Epping’s Bell Hotel Hadush Gerberslasie Kebatu was accidentally released from HMP Chelmsford. The 38-year-old had been wrongly categorised as due to be let out on licence, rather than a foreign offender set for deportation (back to Ethiopia in his case).
At the time of writing, Kebatu is unaccounted for, but was last seen walking through Chelmsford before boarding a London-bound train—gifted a £76 (€87) subsistence payment from the prison service—before sparking a three-police-force regional manhunt. Following the protests that the Ethiopian provoked by sexually assaulting teenage girls and a woman in Epping town centre, he might find it difficult to maintain a low profile. Kebatu has become a public face of the migration crisis since he completed an illegal ‘small boat’ Channel crossing into England on June 29th this year.
Deputy Prime Minister and Justice Secretary gormless David Lammy said “I’m livid,” adding Kebatu “should not have been released in this way.” It is likely that the British public are more livid—faced with horrendous, preventable crimes committed by men who should not even be at large in the UK.
