Alice’s family: State failed us all by letting her killer in
‘Complacent’ officials failed to check violent past of Latvian murderer
HOLES in UK border controls and breathtaking ‘complacency’ let a Latvian murderer kill a schoolgirl in a sexually motivated attack, her family said yesterday.
Alice Gross’s father said she would probably be alive if proper checks had been in place before she was ambushed by Arnis Zalkalns.
The killer entered Britain unchallenged despite serving eight years in his homeland for bludgeoning his wife to death.
In an excoriating attack after an inquest found the 14-year-old was murdered in 2014, her family said: ÷ There was no ‘ proper system’ for monitoring EU nationals’ entry meaning violent criminals move here unchecked; ÷ European countries have no obligation to alert UK authorities about convictions of murderers or sex offenders; ÷ The police and Home Office were guilty of ‘complacent excuses’ for their failure to discover Zalkalns’ criminal past despite his arrest on suspicion of sexual assault two years after arriving; ÷ None of the agencies and orders used to monitor violent and sexual offenders in the UK would have been applicable to a foreign national such as Zalkalns.
After the hearing, Alice’s sister Nina said: ‘ Regardless of whether legal responsibility can be attributed to the state for Alice’s death, I believe the state failed Alice and our family.’
Coroner Dr Fiona Wilcox said she was ‘ highly likely’ to raise concerns with police and the Home Office over checks
‘Gaping hole in public protection’
on immigrants – after a jury found Alice was unlawfully killed in Hanwell, west London. Her naked body was found in the River Brent in September 2014.
Builder Zalkalns, who also had sexual assault and firearms convictions in Latvia, entered the UK unchallenged in 2007 because he was not on an international watch list. Most EU countries do not alert Interpol about those who have served jail sentences, the inquest heard.
His background was not investigated by the Met Police in 2009 after his arrest for an alleged sexual assault on a girl of 14 close to where Alice was later killed, because most officers did not know how to run overseas checks.
Even after Alice’s disappearance, initial checks failed to show Zalkalns was a killer because Latvia deemed the conviction spent.
Outside the Royal Courts of Justice yesterday, Alice’s father Jose fought back tears as he said his family supported the EU and freedom of movement but called for ‘fair and proportionate rules’ to govern serious criminals travelling around the continent. He said: ‘We believe that, had such measures been in place, Alice’s death might have been prevented.’
The family’s statement said there ‘continues to be a failure to have in place a proper system for monitoring the entry of EU nationals with serious criminal convictions’ and that this is ‘particularly troubling’ for freedom of movement rules.
They added: ‘We were concerned about systematic failings in both the police and the Home Office, since nothing appeared to have been known about the criminal record of Arnis Zalkalns … no steps had been taken to monitor him.’
The inquest had raised ‘ongoing issues of public protection’, they said, despite the coroner’s ruling that the failure to monitor Zalkalns could not have caused Alice’s death. The family added that they had been given a ‘plethora of some- times hand-wringing and sometimes frankly complacent excuses – the ability to gain information on Zalkalns’ convictions “was not widely known”, “it was not normal practice”, “there was no policy at the time”, “the EU legislation didn’t allow us to”.
‘Moreover, the systems for managing UK murderers “did not apply” to foreign nationals … ultimately there has been, and remains, a gaping hole in this important aspect of public protection.
‘Through the evidence we have discovered that there was no robust, proactive international system … that would definitely have alerted the UK to [Zalkalns’] dangerous offending history … such an obligation to proactively notify still does not exist and, even if Zalkalns or someone like him came to the UK for the first time today, in all probability the UK would not be made aware of his criminal background unless or until he committed a further offence.’
They added that, in the Europewide system for sharing informa- tion on criminals, the balance between free movement, rehabilitation of offenders, and protecting the public was ‘fundamentally wrong’, adding: ‘Our daughter and our family have paid the price.’
Mr Gross told Channel 4 News the problem was that ‘someone has to be arrested first of all for their records to be checked’.
Miss Hodgkiss added: ‘ The answer is to reform the system of information sharing so that we can protect people.’
The coroner proposed that it should be mandatory for police to perform automated checks of criminal records and Interpol warnings about foreign criminals, with further checks in some cases.
Dr Wilcox said the Home Office should continue to encourage all countries to update the criminal records database and Interpol’s warning list with details of serious convictions, and not delete any.
Met Police deputy assistant commissioner Steve Rodhouse said: ‘Over the last two years we have put significant effort into making sure that when we arrest foreign nationals checks for previous convictions are carried out in as many cases as possible, making sure we can deal with them as effectively as we can UK nationals.’