Alkali thug ‘jumped in Thames and drowned’
THE Clapham chemical attack suspect is likely to have jumped into the Thames in the hours after injuring his ex-partner and her daughters, police said last night.
The Afghan refugee was last seen on CCTV leaning over railings on Chelsea Bridge shortly before midnight last Wednesday, on January 31.
scotland Yard also ended their manhunt last night, saying they believed Abdul ezedi, 35, was dead. But his body may never be found.
Metropolitan Police Commander Jon savell said: ‘At this time of year, the Thames is very fast flowing.
‘It is quite likely that if he has gone in the water, he won’t appear for maybe up to a month and it’s not beyond possibility that he may never actually surface.
‘We have spent the last 24 hours meticulously following the CCTV, and it’s our main working hypothesis that he’s now gone into the water.’
ezedi was given asylum in Britain, despite being a convicted sex offender, after a church minister helped convince an immigration tribunal he had converted to Christianity.
Doubt was cast on his claims when friends this week said he was living as a ‘good Muslim’, buying Halal meat and avoiding alcohol. The Mail can reveal judges have been warning for a decade asylum seekers have ‘fabricated’ Christian conversions in an attempt to stay in the UK.
Nearly 300 appeals have been lodged – many rejected – by migrants claiming to have embraced the religion after arriving here.
While some conversions are genuine, church leaders and judges have warned of attempts to ‘pull the wool’ over the eyes of officials in a ‘cynical ploy’, official judgments show.
The number of cases has soared since the start of the small boats crisis, which has seen more than 110,000 people cross the Channel to reach Britain illegally since 2018.
A Daily Mail investigation found:
■ One asylum seeker who claimed to be a Christian convert was told he could stay in Britain on that basis – despite referring to Good Friday as ‘Black Friday’. The same man also referred to his stockton church as Catholic, when in fact it was an Anglican parish church;
■ A 33-year- old woman, whose claim was ultimately rejected, insisted she was a Pentecostal Christian. But when questioned about Pentecost, she placed the story in the Old Testament and ‘recounted the story of Noah and the Ark’, when it is actually in the New Testament and about the descent of the Holy spirit following the resurrection of Jesus;
■ A Home Office official admitted Christian conversion was often seen as a ‘trump card’ during asylum cases in 2016 court documents;
■ In 2014, a judge dismissed an appeal from an Iranian national who had been refused entry into the UK because his ‘minimal knowledge of Christianity and his relatively short period of Church attendance revealed this to be a cynical ploy’. A higher judge overturned this after hearing claims that even if it was cynical it left him at risk in Iran;
■ In 2018, in a witness statement, a pastor told a judge he was aware that some asylum seekers would seek to ‘pull the wool over my eyes’.
The Upper Tribunal – considering appeals in immigration cases – has considered 297 claims since 2002 that referred to the migrants involved converting to Christianity while in the UK. The number of appeals relating to Christian conversions in Britain rocketed as migrants began using small boats to enter the country. Only two were made in 2008 compared to 54 in 2018.
Critics last night hailed the Mail’s revelations and called for churches to carry out greater due diligence before lending support to conversion claims. Former home secretary Dame Priti Patel slammed Left-wing lawyers for wasting public money on the ‘asylum merry-go-round’.
she said: ‘The Mail’s evidence shows there’s a historic trail where judges back in 2014 were basically warning against granting cases on the basis that sudden religious conversion changes everything – it simply does not. This is why we have to clamp down. The courts need to be sharper.’
Official Home Office guidance says quizzing apparent converts about their knowledge of Christianity ‘beyond the most basic knowledge’ should ‘not be the main line of questioning or usually the determining factor in decisions’
The guidelines do stress ‘answers to questions which are clearly wrong will call into question the credibility of the conversion’. The Home Office was contacted for comment.
‘Very fast flowing at this time of year’