The Rape of Europe’s Daughters

They ACCIDENTALLY released a convicted sex offender and illegal migrant?! My God, how incompetent is the Government?

From The European Conservative

By Lauren Smith

The farcical story of the Epping migrant sex offender should be a wake-up call to our open-borders-loving elites. But it won’t be.

If it weren’t so depressing, it would almost be funny. Last weekend, the UK watched in horror as the Metropolitan Police unleashed a two-day manhunt for a convicted sex offender and illegal migrant who had been accidentally released from prison. 

How did we get here? Hadush Kebatu, a 41-year-old Ethiopian, entered the UK by small boat in June this year and was placed in an asylum centre at the Bell Hotel in Epping, Essex. Just a few days after his arrival, he approached a 14-year-old girl wearing her school uniform in Epping town centre, making sexually explicit comments and attempting to kiss her. The next day, he tried to kiss a different woman, before encountering the 14-year-old again and sexually assaulting her. He was arrested and charged. 

Kebatu’s time in the UK was not off to a great start. News of his crime would spark massive protests—first, in Epping, outside the Bell Hotel, where furious locals demanded that the migrants be removed, fearing for the safety of women and children. The hotel, which had already harboured one sex offender, was just a 10-minute walk away from a secondary school. These anti-asylum hotel protests spread to the rest of the UK, culminating in a summer of demonstrations. 

While these dramatic scenes were playing out, Kebatu was being tried and convicted. In September, he was found guilty of two counts of sexual assault, one count of attempted sexual assault, one count of inciting a girl to engage in sexual activity and one count of harassment without violence. As such, he was sentenced to 12 months in prison. He would also have to sign on to the sex offenders’ register for 10 years, and was warned he could be deported. Last week, that threat was supposed to come to fruition. Kebatu was released from HMP Chelmsford and should have been sent on to a deportation centre. Yet for some reason—“human error,” apparently—he was processed by a prison officer, given a £76 discharge payment, and sent on his merry way. 

What did Kebatu do with his newfound freedom? Well, he tried to take himself back to prison. A delivery driver said he witnessed Kebatu return to Chelmsford “four or five times” in the space of an hour and a half. He appeared to be “very confused.” Realising that the prison wanted nothing to do with him, he then took the train to London, where he proceeded to wander around aimlessly, still dressed in his grey prison tracksuit. It took the authorities at Chelmsford one whole hour before they realised what had happened—at which point, they informed Metropolitan Police, who in turn put out urgent announcements, asking members of the public to report if they saw Kebatu, and urging Kebatu to turn himself in. After two days of him leisurely strolling around the world’s most surveilled city, police arrested Kebatu in Finsbury Park. 

Prime Minister Keir Starmer has now promised that Kebatu will be deported, and that there will be an investigation into why he was released. But the fact remains that he should never have been in the UK in the first place. By all rights, this farcical incident should force the government to finally make a real attempt to stop the flow of undocumented migrants into the UK. But by now, we all know that this won’t happen. Until this particular story blew up, the government seemed largely uninterested in stopping Kebatu and the tens of thousands of migrants like him from illegally crossing the channel. While it’s progress that Kebatu specifically will now hopefully be sent back to Ethiopia, he is just one man—one tiny part of a much bigger problem. 

When faced with news that a young girl has been raped or otherwise assaulted, any healthy society would immediately band together and demand justice. The state, you might hope, would jump to address whatever mistake allowed this to happen. This is rarely the case when the perpetrator is a migrant or asylum seeker. Last week, Ireland was reminded of this sad fact, when news broke that a 10-year-old girl had allegedly been raped by a 26-year-old African failed asylum seeker, who is waiting to be deported. The Irish people responded, as you would expect, with outrage, which boiled over into riots in Dublin. The Irish government, however, was quicker to condemn the unrest than the alleged act that sparked it. We can all hope that the perpetrator is swiftly brought to justice and, if found guilty, deported. But will this horrific case force the Irish political establishment to reckon with mass migration more broadly? It looks like they have their heads firmly buried in the sand. 

The same can be said for Sweden. Last year, Meya Åberg, then 16 years old, was raped while walking home from a shift at McDonald’s, where she worked. While passing through a tunnel, she was attacked by Yazied Mohamed, an Eritrean refugee. It took a great deal of effort for Mohamed to be brought to justice at all—when Åberg first reported the assault to the police, he was acquitted due to a lack of evidence. But after appealing the case, he was slapped with a three-year jail sentence and ordered to pay 240,000 kronor to his victim. Despite this, the crime was not deemed grave enough for Mohamed to be deported. According to the Court of Appeal for Upper Norrland, it was not “extremely serious”, because Åberg had not been raped for long enough. 

If raping a child does not warrant deportation, then what does? How many Swedish girls have to be attacked before the authorities consider it serious enough? If Mohamed had killed Åberg, would he have been deported then? These are the kinds of trade-offs our pro-migration elites are willing to make. They have no qualms about sacrificing women and girls in order to appear virtuous and tolerant. 

Another sickening example of this trend is the case of Lola Daviet. In 2022, the 12-year-old French schoolgirl was raped and murdered by Dahbia Benkired, a 27-year-old Algerian woman who was living in France illegally. Benkired was given a life sentence without parole last week, making her the first woman in France to receive it. It’s a good thing that she is receiving the harshest possible punishment. But, once again, she shouldn’t have been in France at all. She had overstayed her student visa, had no job, and no permanent home. At the time of the crime, she had been under a deportation order. Shortly after Daviet’s murder, the Bill to Control Immigration and Improve Integration was introduced to parliament, aimed at making it easier to deport foreign criminals, among other measures. But by the time this was signed into law in 2024, it had been stripped of much of its powers, under pressure by human-rights groups. Virtually nothing will have changed as a result of this tragedy. 

Why do Western governments seem to care so little about protecting women and girls? Why do they prioritise the rights of dangerous newcomers like Kebatu, Mohamed, and Benkired over the safety of people who have lived in these countries their entire lives? Women’s rights are all the rage when the focus is on the ‘gender pay gap,’ catcalling, and microaggressions. But as soon as the conversation turns to sending home foreign sex offenders and stopping the importation of tens of thousands of people we know absolutely nothing about, the mood instantly sours. Women suddenly aren’t so important anymore. 

Europe’s daughters deserve better than this. They deserve governments that will actually protect them, and that will continue to care about their safety long after the news cycle has moved on. The world might forget about Lola and Meya. We will forget that 10-year-old girl in Ireland, or the 14-year-old in Epping. But we will be forced to learn the names, faces, and stories of many more girls if our elites continue down this path.