Toddler left at risk from ‘cannibal’ father by bungling social workers

INCOMPETENT social workers exposed a little girl to danger from her murderous father with cannibal fantasies, a High Court judge has revealed.

Their bungling meant the foster home of the child, now aged three, could have been discovered by the father.

He had previously threatened that ‘if he could not have the baby, then nobody else would’.

But despite three years of mistakes, a list of 16 major failures and the risk to the public from the psychotic parent, the full facts are not being revealed.

Mrs Justice Roberts has decided that the names of the staff and the county council which employed them should stay secret.

The cover-up means the authority’s incompetence and threat of revenge attacks by the father will be kept hidden from residents.

The judge said the man was psychotic, unstable, violent and had served long prison terms.

She also recorded an extraordinary list of those he posed a threat to, including his own parents, the general public, children, wildlife and people from different cultures or religions.

Mrs Justice Roberts added: ‘His thought processes... have extended from the maiming of small animals to cannibalism.’

She said the man had ‘significant’ computer skills, was ‘proficient’ at hacking firewalls and had said that ‘he would have the means to find the girl wherever she was placed’.

Her decision is the second within months in which a judge has used family court rules to protect a failed council and social workers from public exposure.

Such scandals are increasingly kept secret under new rules which say that naming the town or county where a child lives might lead to their identity becoming known.

Last year a High Court judge ruled that a council which allowed a paedophile access to vulnerable children should not be named.

Mr Justice Hayden later lifted the ban and the council was identified as Haringey, the north London borough involved in the 2007 Baby P child death scandal.

In the latest case, the danger from the father was disclosed in a High Court hearing in which Mrs Justice Roberts ruled the girl should be adopted by her foster parents.

They have cared for her since she was aged three months.

The biological mother and father are thought to be in an unnamed European country with a son born 13 months after their daughter. Mrs Justice Roberts said steps are being taken to ‘recover’ the boy.

She decided against the girl being adopted by relatives of her grandmother in the United States as she has known only her foster carers for most of her life.

The judge blamed the council for a ‘dispiriting catalogue of failures’ and listed 16 ‘issues’ involving its social workers and lawyers.

‘Psychotic and unstable’