Blunders that let radicalised father hunt down and kill his daughter, aged 7
A FATHER who shot dead his seven-year-old daughter had won asylum in the UK after claiming he faced persecution in his home country over accusations he fought alongside radical Islamists.
Egyptian Yasser Alromisse had entered Britain illegally before being granted leave to remain.
The violent and jealous father shot his daughter Mary Shipstone twice in the head as she returned home from school with her mother on September 11, 2014.
He took ‘revenge’ after his English wife Lyndsey Shipstone rejected Islam and him. The 46-year-old then turned the gun on himself.
A serious case review into Mary’s death also revealed a catalogue of blunders, including Alromisse being posted his estranged wife’s new address.
The review found that he claimed asylum ‘based on the grounds that there were accusations in his home country that he had been part of a radical religious group and that he would also be persecuted for having fought with Islamists in Bosnia’.
The report stated that he ‘always acknowledged that he had been in Bosnia, but said that he had been an aid worker’. ‘Either version of events, or parts of both, may have been true,’ it stated.
The disclosures raise serious questions about why someone with links to radical Islam was granted asylum in the UK.
The Home Office declined to comment.
A number of men went to fight alongside the persecuted Muslim Bosnians during the war that followed the breakup of the former Yugoslavia. The Egyptian regime at the time took a hard line against Islamic extremists. Alromisse, who came to the UK in either 1998 or 1999, married Miss Shipstone in Liverpool in 2005 after she converted to Islam. But he was violent and controlling and they separated.
At the time of the murder they were locked in a bitter custody dispute over Mary.
Miss Shipstone and her daughter were living in a safe house in East Sussex. The mother had told police she feared he would try to kill them both and said that he had been stalking them.
In September 2011, the mother’s bank statements were wrongly sent to her husband’s address. Then in February 2012 her address was ‘inadvertently disclosed’ to Alromisse again, this time by the Child Support Agency. And in April 2014 her solicitor revealed the address in legal papers sent to him.
Miss Shipstone reported the solicitor’s blunder to the police but the force passed it to the wrong neighbourhood team ‘where it was closed without further action’, the review said.
Despite these errors, the authors of the report concluded that no one could have predicted or prevented the killing in Northiam, near Rye, East Sussex.
It said there was no evidence Alromisse located the pair through the inadvertent disclosures of the girl’s address.
The 73-page report noted: ‘Information... indicates that between May and September 2014, the father had known roughly where Child P was living and that he used the internet, employed others and made journeys to the area to seek to locate her exactly.’
‘Part of a radical religious group’