Wrongly released inmate triggered costly police operation across Essex and London forces
The manhunt for the wrongly-released sex offender at the center of the Epping asylum hotel protests cost taxpayers more than £150,000, a review has found.
A manhunt was launched after Hadush Kebatu was mistakenly freed from HMP Chelmsford last October.
He had been residing at the Bell Hotel in Essex when he was charged with the sexual assault of a 14-year-old girl, leading to a series of protests outside the venue over the summer.
Kebatu was later convicted of five offenses—including sexual assault—and jailed, but was then mistakenly released before being detained and deported to Ethiopia.
The three-day manhunt to find him cost Essex Police and the Metropolitan Police a total of £152,738, with officers from both forces also working extra hours to locate the inmate, according to a review by former Met Police deputy commissioner Dame Lynne Owens.
Most officers at the Essex force worked an additional five to seven hours beyond their scheduled shifts, with some ending up working 17-hour shifts.
The manhunt cost the force £80,656.
At the Met, 1,178 officer and staff hours were utilized, and the two-day search cost the London force £72,082.
Dame Lynne described the issue as a “symptom of a broken system.”
Ministry of Justice figures published on Wednesday showed that 179 inmates were mistakenly released between April 2025 and March 2026—an average of three prisoners a week.
Justice Secretary David Lammy told ITV News that he did not want to “blame the frontline staff for what Dame Lynne finds is a broken system” when asked about the officers involved in Kebatu’s release.
“It’s a system error, and of course it’s our job as government to address and fix that,” he said.
He also told the outlet that the system was a “product of underinvestment over successive governments, but particularly the last 14 years of austerity.”
Pia Sinha, chief executive of the Prison Reform Trust, said: “The mistaken release of Hadush Kebatu was a shocking failure, exposing a criminal justice system under such strain that it had failed in its most basic duty.
“As we have now learned, this was unfortunately not an isolated case, with 179 releases in error occurring between April 1, 2025, to March 31, 2026.”
She said the system would “remain vulnerable” to further errors until staffing pressures were resolved.
Politics Editor
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