The second prisoner who mistakenly walked out of HMP Wandsworth has been tracked down and arrested. The Metropolitan Police confirmed that 24-year-old Algerian national Brahim Kaddour-Cherif was picked up in Islington after almost a week on the run.
Police said a member of the public called at 11:23am on Friday, November 7, to report spotting someone who looked like Kaddour-Cherif near Capital City College on Blackstock Road. Officers moved quickly and detained a man at 11:30am. After confirming his identity, he was arrested for being unlawfully at large and on suspicion of assaulting an emergency worker from an earlier incident. He is now back in custody and the Prison Service has been notified.
Kaddour-Cherif, who also uses the name Ibrahim, was convicted in November 2024 for indecent exposure relating to a March incident and placed on the s3x offenders register for five years. His most recent jail term, however, was for trespass with intent to steal. He had also appeared in court recently for failing to comply with s3x-offender requirements. Authorities say he is not an asylum seeker and originally entered the UK legally on a visitor visa in 2019 before overstaying. Deportation proceedings were underway when he was mistakenly released.
Footage from the arrest showed him wearing glasses, a grey jumper, a black headband, dark green trousers and a backpack. He denied being Brahim when questioned, saying “everyone knows him, he’s in the news,” before officers compared his face to a printed image and re-cuffed him.
A homeless Algerian man living near Finsbury Park, Nadjib Mekdhia, said he recognised Kaddour-Cherif from a newspaper photo and immediately called 999. He said he was proud to have done the right thing and didn’t want people like Kaddour-Cherif in his community.
Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy confirmed the arrest and said the government inherited a prison system “in crisis,” adding that mistaken releases were unacceptable. He announced new release checks, an independent investigation into systemic failures and a wider overhaul of outdated prison processes.
The case comes just after another inmate, 35-year-old Billy Smith, was also mistakenly freed from the same prison on Monday before turning himself in. The recent blunders follow the wrongful release of Ethiopian migrant and notorious s3x offender Hadush Kebatu from HMP Chelmsford, a case that triggered nationwide protests earlier this year. Kebatu was eventually arrested and deported on October 28.
