Sunday Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Hundreds of foreign killers still get in UK
Cops in dark...until they strike here
HUNDREDS of killers and rapists were among foreign criminals who slipped into Britain undetected, police figures show.
UK forces received no alert and officers often only discovered their criminal past after arresting them in connection with an offence here. Most were from eastern Europe. David Spencer, research director at the Centre for Crime Prevention, said: “It is absolutely staggering hundreds of serious offenders have been able to walk in unchallenged. The law-abiding public will rightly be deeply concerned.
“Brexit is supposed to have allowed us to take back control of our borders.
“Nobody from overseas with convictions for crimes like murder, rape, and child sex offences should be allowed into the country, full stop. And those already here should be removed asap.”
He said such concerns should not be painted as racism or xenophobia and added: “People have... concerns over public safety when people like this can just walk into the country.” In the past three years, the ACRO Criminal Records Office carried out 436,731 computerised cross-checks in the EU.
Some 549 cases showed the suspect had a conviction for murder or manslaughter, while 561 involved rape and
406 Statistics were linked show to 280 child with sex convictions crime. for murder and manslaughter came from Romania, 72 were from Poland and 34 from Lithuania.
In 2017, Michael Podlaszczyk, 33, got life for raping and robbing a woman in a Leicester park. The Pole had come to England weeks after serving 12 years for killing a man in a drunken rage.
In Peterborough in 2015, Vytautas Jokubauskas, then 57, killed his partner. He had been jailed in Lithuania for killing a man in a brawl. The same year, Raimondas Jakstas, 26, was jailed for assault in Boston, Lincs. He served five years in Lithuania after beating someone to death.
ACRO çconfirmed 0.13% of checks revealed a murder or rape conviction, and 0.09% a child sex offence.