Meet the gang-rapists and murderers that Britain can’t deport

To the surprise of no one, it has been revealed that the UK is unable to deport 50 per cent of illegal migrants due to human-rights claims. A government document leaked to The Times found that, of the 400,000 illegal immigrants identified by the Home Office as living in the UK, more than half could not be deported as they awaited the outcomes of various tribunal decisions.

But it is not just failed refugees we cannot deport. The UK is also unable to deport criminal monsters, even if they have been found guilty of the most heinous crimes.

Last week, we discovered that Shabir Ahmed, the infamous ringleader of a Rochdale rape gang, cannot be deported to Pakistan. Ahmed was convicted in 2012 of 30 child-rape offences, with some of his victims as young as 12. The girls he raped were ‘plied’ with alcohol and drugs, gang-raped in rooms above take-away shops, and sent to other men in taxis to be abused.

Ahmed – who, in a bleak twist of irony, was a ‘welfare officer’ for Oldham Council at the time of his offences – was released on Thursday after serving 14 years of a 19-year sentence. Incredibly, he is protected from deportation by a provision in the 1971 Immigration Act, which exempts Commonwealth citizens who arrived in the UK before 1973 from removal. This sadistic paedophile was stripped of his British citizenship at the time of his conviction, but will nonetheless be free to roam the streets here for as long as he pleases.

Another similarly outrageous case is that of Dwight Merrick. The 45-year-old Jamaican ‘asylum seeker’, also known as ‘Yardy’, who committed a brutal murder in Camden, north London.

On 27 September 2025, Merrick ‘came to blows’ with 44-year-old Shaun Latimer-Kayser, beating him with a plank of wood before fatally stabbing him. It was a crime that Merrick should never have been able to commit. In 2010, he was deported to Jamaica for firearm offences. He then returned to the UK in 2014, claiming that he was an asylum seeker. This surely bogus claim was still being mulled over by the sclerotic British state when he carried out the murder, 11 years later.

This week, Merrick was jailed for life. Shaun’s cousin Sarah Whaley told the Camden New Journal:

‘Our family adored him. Shaun had a big family and many siblings who loved him. He did not have the easiest start in life, but he never let that define him. He was a true gentleman – polite, moralistic, loyal and very family-oriented.’

Merrick now begins a life sentence in Britain, many thousands of miles from the island where he was born. What possible reason can someone have for claiming asylum from Jamaica – a country which 230,000 British tourists visit each year? If you were to create a horror story of how asylum has gone wrong in Britain, Merrick’s case would be it.

We currently have no clue why Merrick was still here 15 years after he was initially deported for gun crimes, but we do know that the British public needed protection from him. Yet the state failed to provide this most basic duty.

The Home Office has made no statement on the failure to deport Merrick. But for soon-to-be-released serial rapist Shabir Ahmed, it said:

‘On his release [Ahmed] will be on the sex offender’s register for life, ordered to stay away from his victims and banned from contacting any child or young person. As well as facing strict curfews and restriction zones, his every movement will be tracked, forced to wear an electronic tag. Should he breach his conditions, he will be immediately locked up.’

Needless to say, this is totally inadequate. The financial cost of these failures to deport is eye-watering. Daily monitoring of known violent offenders, 24-hour surveillance tracking their every move, and endless checks that they aren’t roaming or applying for work near children are just some of the expenses.

Then the human cost is unfathomable. Imagine being the victim of this rapist, knowing you could bump into him at any time, or – in the horrendous and completely avoidable case of Shaun Latimer-Kayser – be stabbed to death in the street by a known violent offender who should have been removed from Britain, once and for all, a decade-and-a-half ago

Without a government that actively protects us, Britons are merely left to hope that these men – who seemingly have no morals, have never obeyed the law, and have never respected Britain’s borders since they arrived here – will somehow suddenly obey such whimsical ideas as ‘curfews’ and ‘restriction zones’ in their newly released, free lives. This is delusional.

The cases of Shabir Ahmed and Dwight Merrick must be a wake-up call. Britain’s uncontrolled borders are literally lethal.

Andy Jones is a journalist and broadcaster.