Add thelocalreport.in As A Trusted Source
which is the same prison responsible for releasing by mistake a migrant sex offender Last week also a conspiracy was hatched to free a fraudster convicted two years ago.
disguised as an email royal court of justice The correspondence was sent in June 2023 to HMP Chelmsford Instructing the jail to release convicted fraudster Junaid Ahmed on bail.
At the time Ahmed was awaiting sentence after he admitted posing as a doctor to rent a property he could not afford and buy a house worth more than £2 million.
Ahmed was released from custody later that day following the instructions in the email, and this came after staff received two further emails from the same address a day later prisoners Upon being freed he realized that the emails were fake.
One of the emails, addressed to Charlotte Whittaker, was also released during the chaos.
A member of the prison staff became suspicious of these orders and after further investigation, the Royal Court of Justice verified that no release orders had been given for either man and that Ahmed had been wrongly released.
Essex Police said the email appeared to be authentic because it contained “numerous identifying marks” that employees could easily deceive.
On 23 June, Essex Police again arrested Ahmed, who was hiding on the terrace of his house to avoid legal custody.
Later that day, Charlotte Whittaker was also arrested at her home and her phone confiscated, which showed messages between her, Ahmed and his wife and two other prisoners planning their escape.
on friday, Three-day national search operation Hadush Kebatu, a man convicted of sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl in Epping, has been launched after being mistakenly released from HMP Chelmsford.
The offender was arrested later on Sunday morning and is being detained at HMP Wormwood Scrubs in west London.
Kebatu was to be transferred to an immigration removal center before being deported to his home country Ethiopia.
Now he will be waiting for a second flight to Ethiopia this week after he accidentally missed the flight he was supposed to take during his release.
One officer was immediately fired Friday as a result of the error following an internal investigation.
Addressing the House of Commons, David LammyThe Justice Secretary and Deputy Prime Minister were expected to announce an inquiry into the mistakes made, shedding more light on the prison’s failings.
Lammy said all prisons will now be required to go through enhanced security measures before releasing any inmate, including filling out a mandatory three-page checklist before inmates are released to prevent the error being repeated in the future.
-copy.jpeg)
However, prison governors argue that this proactive response from ministers will do nothing but increase the workload of already overburdened prison staff, adding an extra 45 minutes per prisoner.
These mistakes are becoming more common, with the number of prisoners mistakenly released doubling in the last year. This is partly due to the government’s emergency release scheme, brought in to deal with the problem of overcrowding and the shortage of free prison cells.
As of March 2025, 262 prisoners were released concurrently, a 128 percent increase compared to 115 the previous year.
The chief inspector of prisons, Charlie Taylor, warned that the mistake of releasing Kebatu was endemic of a much larger, sinister issue.
He said: “This is a case that is in the news because it is an incredibly high-profile prisoner who has been convicted of a very serious crime. But the worrying thing is that there has been so much going on, under the radar, all this recently and I am concerned about that.”