See no evil

Government won't publish data linking migration & crime, despite a growing number of horrendous cases

It seems like there’s been a lot of reports recently about crimes committed by people who shouldn’t have been in this country.

Is there a trend, or is it just being reported more? Or am I just imagining this spike?

The government has made it very hard to answer these questions, because it systematically refuses to publish statistics on crime and migration. One of the most frustrating things is that often the data is collected and then nothing is done with it.

I came across a yet another example of this recently. I asked the Department for Transport (DFT) for the number of road traffic incidents where the driver had a non-UK licence. I know they collect this data, because police fill it in on a form. But when I asked for the data they said they don’t collate it:

The Department does not hold data on whether drivers involved in collisions held a GB or non-GB driving licence. Whilst the non-GB licence field is on the National Collision Reporting Form, it is not designated as a statistical field and is therefore not routinely extracted or supplied to the Department for national statistical purposes.

DFT’s lack of interest in their own data is not unique. In fact it’s the norm at every stage of the criminal justice system:

• Arrests. Data on arrests by nationality and immigration status (e.g. were they here illegally, an asylum seeker, on ILR, or a British Citizen) are not centrally collected. This is despite the fact that many forces do collect the data in one way or another. Using FOI, the Centre for Migration Control (CMC) have managed to get answers out of some forces. Of the 44 police forces, 39 responded to FOI requests, showing a total of 163,009 arrests of foreign nationals. For example, of the 9,771 arrests carried out by British Transport Police officers in the year 2024/2025, 3,688 (37.7%) of these were foreign nationals.

• Prosecutions. The MOJ doesn’t publish data on prosecutions or convictions by nationality or immigration status. Again, this refusal to publish the data is despite the fact that it is being collected. Again the CMC have managed to get some of it via FOI. They found there had been 104,000 convictions of non-UK nationals between 2021 and 2023.

• Prisoners. The MOJ does publish a breakdown of prisoners by nationality. But they won’t provide a breakdown by immigration status - so you can’t find out how many of them were in the UK illegally when they offended, or whether they were asylum seekers or on a visa or ILR.

I take my hat off to think tanks like the CMC for their work to dig out data on this - but as they point out themselves, the data forced out via FOI requests is either old or patchy or inconsistent with lots of under-reporting, and it often lacks detailed breakdowns.

And I don’t think country of birth is published for any of this data - so if you have moved here and got citizenship you will show up as a UK national in the FOI data above. Even back in 2021 there were 4.3m people in England and Wales born abroad who had British passports, and another half a million got citizenship since then, so the all-in, long-run impact of migration is understated in the data.

The Home Office and MOJ could and should be producing timely, high-quality consistent data on migration and crime which would allow us to really understand the trends.

What little hard data we do have on migration and crime seems to chime with everything else we know about migration: it suggests that far from being homogenous there are massive differences in crime rates between different migrant groups. These differences should be properly understood and feeding in to policy. Instead they are just being ignored.

What’s going on?

This lack of transparency undermines public trust - particularly as there have just been an awful lot of high profile cases recently.

Here is what I can find with just a basic newspaper trawl - 60 high profile offences in just six months. (One thing I’m also struck by is how some news outlets tend not to mention offenders’ nationality, despite public interest.)

• 12^th May - Bawan Harwe, an Iraqi national, and Sharam Muhamadi, an Iranian national, appeared in court on trial for 21 alleged sexual offences, including rape, grooming and false imprisonment, of seven girls as young as 12 in Barnsley. (GB News). The BBC report fails to mention their nationality.

• 10^th May - Najeebullah Arab, an Afghan national, pleaded guilty to sexual communication with a child. Arab had previously pleaded guilty to the sexual assault, rape and kidnapping of two victims in separate incidents in January 2026. (Oxford Mail). The BBC report of the earlier offence on the 13^th March failed to mention his nationality.

• 9^th May - Abdoela Berhan, an asylum seeker from Eritrea, found guilty of assault after knocking a young woman unconscious and breaking her nose after she and her friends rejected his advances. The assault took place just a week after he was convicted of attacking a Subway worker in another incident. Berhan is currently on the run, after failing to show up for either of his cases. (Bournemouth Echo)

• 7^th May - Wahidullah Hotak, an Afghan asylum seeker, jailed for raping a woman in Wednesbury after she came into a shop asking to use the toilet. The court heard that Hotak had had his asylum claim rejected but was intending to appeal the decision. (Birmingham Mail)

• 5^th May – Mohammed Abdullah, a Syrian refugee who arrived in 2023 and was granted permanent leave to remain under a family reunion scheme, appeared in court accused of raping and assaulting a 19-year-old woman on Bournemouth seafront. (The Telegraph)

• 5^th May - Hussein Almiyyahi, an Iraqi asylum seeker, jailed for four counts of sexual assault against three women, after a series of incidents as a nightclub in Oxford. The offence took place 9 months after Almiyyahi arrived in the UK. (Oxford Mail)

• 1^st May - Abdullah AlbadrI, A man born in Kuwait who had entered the UK illegally twice in four years, found guilty of preparing a terror-related knife attack after attempting to climb into the Israeli embassy in London. The attempted attack took place just 16 days after he arrived in the UK by small boat. (BBC News)

• 1^st May - Meron Habtu, an asylum seeker from Eritrea who entered the UK illegally in 2020, found guilty of sexually assaulting a 15-year-old girl on a train. The court heard that Habtu had lied about his age so he could live with a host family. (Daily Mail)

• 1^st May – Essa Suleiman, a Somalia national granted British citizenship, charged with attempted murder after attacking two Jewish men in Golders Green, and another man in the south of the city. It has been reported that Suleiman had previously been sentenced to 9 years in prison in 2008 for stabbing two police officers and a police dog. (BBC News)

• 30^th April - Gift Oladele, a Nigerian national, sentenced to 17 years for dragging a 19-year-old woman into woods and raping her. It emerged that he had been jailed in 2022 for a sexually motivated attack and had avoided deportation on human rights grounds. The judge at the immigration tribunal in 2024 said the fact that Oladele would be “a complete outsider should he relocate to Nigeria” and that he had a “developed private life having grown up in the United Kingdom” outweighed the public interest in deporting him. (BBC News)

• 30^th April - Shahram Rasouli, an asylum seeker from Iran, jailed for seven years after raping a 17-year-old girl at his Salvation Army-run accommodation in Denmark Hill, having plied her with alcohol. (The Telegraph)

• 28^th April - Yashin Himasara, a Sri-Lankan national living in an asylum hotel, appeared in court where he was accused of abducting and raping a 15-year-old girl before trying to flee the country with her. (Daily Mail)

• 28^th April - Hashmat Miakhel and Sayed Hoshmand, both Afghan nationals, appeared in court charged with the rape of a woman in Plymouth. (BBC News)

• 28^th April – Mohammed Shakavan, an Iraqi national, charged with the attempted rape of a child and sexual activity with a child. Greater Manchester Police said the charges relate to a report that a boy under the age of 16 was seriously sexually assaulted. (Manchester Evening News)

• 27^th April – Safi Dawood, an Afghan migrant who arrived by lorry in 2020 and was granted asylum, appeared in court admitting to stabbing his landlord and a 14-year-old boy. He also faces a charge of murdering dog-walker Wayne Broadhurst. (BBC News)

• 27^th April – Rawand Abdulrahman, an Iraqi asylum seeker, jailed for deliberately starting fires at two Essex hotels used to house asylum seekers, in an attempt to be moved elsewhere. (BBC News)

• 25^th April – A 14-year-old Iranian national, avoids jail despite being found guilty of raping a teenage classmate, and is sentenced to a rehabilitation order with a requirement to join specialist sessions on consent instead. The boy committed the offence within three months of entering the country as an unaccompanied child migrant on a small boat. (The Sun)

• 25^th April – Afsar Safi, an Afghan asylum seeker who arrived by small boat, sentenced to two and a half years in prison after being convicted of kidnapping and sexually assaulting a seven-year-old child at a government-funded hotel in Acton. The offender had previously stated in his asylum application that he had been with the Taliban since childhood. (Daily Express)

• 24^th April – Four Romanian nationals charged in connection with a rape of a teenage girl in Gravesend. Ionut Dobre, 33, and two boys 16, and 15, were charged with rape, while Benone Inofte, 46, been charged with aiding and abetting a rape. (BBC News)

• 23^rd April – Abdulla Ahmadi, an asylum seeker from Iran, and Ibrahim Alshafe and Karin Al-Danasurt, asylum seekers from Egypt, convicted of raping a highly intoxicated woman who had become separated from her friends on Brighton beach. During the trial, one of the men told the court that “rape to me is sex.” It also emerged that the same man had fled Egypt to avoid serving a lengthy sentence for murder for which he had already been convicted. The men were living at a Home Office hotel near Horsham at the time of the offence. (BBC News)

• 14^th April – Magistrates issued a warrant for the arrest of Thabani Maposa, a migrant staying at a hotel in Bournemouth, for the assault of a 14-year-old girl at a holiday park after offering whisky, cannabis and cocaine to her group of friends. The man failed to appear for his trial and was found guilty of assault in his absence. (The Telegraph)

• 9^th April – Mohammed Mirzai, an Afghan asylum seeker, jailed for sexually assaulting two different women on trains eight days apart. The week before, the same man had been sentenced to a separate 30-week jail term for crawling along the floor at Perth Leisure Pool to look up at a naked swimmer in a locked cubicle while on bail for the train offences. (BBC News)

• 9^th April – Thomas Mesai Siyoum, an Eritrean national who arrived by small boat in 2024, sentenced to three years and one month for a stabbing on the Oxford Brookes University campus. (Oxford Mail)

• 1^st April - Jitendrakumar Prajapati, an Uber Eats delivery driver, jailed for raping a customer hours after delivering food to her home in Boston. Prajapati told the victim he needed help getting a visa and a job. (BBC News). It has been reported elsewhere that the offender is an Indian national, but the BBC does not mention his nationality.

• 1^st April – Kamran Khan, a failed Pakistani asylum seeker, jailed for the grooming and repeated abuse of an eight-year-old girl. Khan was convicted of two counts of rape of a child, four counts of sexually assaulting a child and two counts of causing a child under thirteen to engage in sexual activity. (Daily Express)

• 1^st April - Sukirthan Thangrasha, an asylum seeker from Sri Lanka, jailed after being found guilty of indecent exposure. Thangrasha also pleaded guilty to two charges of assault against two members of staff at the hotel where he was being accommodated, as well as one count of using threatening, abusive, or insulting words or behaviour when he shouted a sexual profanity at a child in a cemetery in Portsmouth. (The Portsmouth News)

• 27^th March - Ahmad Mulakhil, an Afghan asylum seeker who arrived on a small boat, was sentenced to 15 years in prison for the abduction and rape of a 12-year-old girl in Nuneaton. The man arrived in the UK four months before he raped the girl. (BBC News)

• 18^th March - Mohand Mageed, a Syrian refugee, jailed for attacking and raping a university student walking home from a 21st birthday party in Glasgow. Mageed had been granted leave to remain in the UK six months before his arrest and had been living at the city’s Alexander Thomson Hotel for the homeless at the time of the offence. (The Sun)

• 18^th March – Omar Moman, an Afghan national, charged with assault after allegedly attacking people with a metal bar after he was denied an appointment. Police said six people needed treatment in hospital after the attack. (The Telegraph)

• 15^th March - Mohammed Abdulraziq, a Sudanese migrant, jailed for the sexual assault of a five-year-old girl after snatching her from the street. Abdulraziq held his victim in his bedsit until the girl’s mother, who was desperately searching for her, heard her crying and she was rescued by two men who forced their way into the ground floor room. He had previously admitted charges of assault, attempted assault and criminal damage in relation to a separate incident. (The Telegraph)

• 9^th March - Yousif Al-Maliki, an Iraqi asylum seeker who arrived by small boat, found guilty of raping a woman he had just met while staying at the Astor Hostel in South Kensington. The man’s lawyers claimed that he had fled Iraq seeking refuge due to his bisexuality. (The Standard)

• 6^th March – Sohail Amiri, an Afghan asylum seeker who arrived in the country by small boat, jailed for sexual offences against three lone women in the street. (BBC News)

• 4^th March – Mustafa Kokoneh, a Libyan national, charged with attempting to murder two people and assaulting two others during an incident in Edinburgh. Kokoneh arrived in the UK in 2019 and was granted citizenship four years later. (BBC News)

• 4^th March – Saif Rahman and Ibrahim Zarifkhel, both listed as staying at an Edinburgh hotel where migrants have been housed, charged with sexually assaulting a 15-year-old girl at the National Gallery of Scotland. (The Sun)

• 27^th February – Musafar Hotak, a migrant from Afghanistan, jailed for the rape of a “vulnerable intoxicated” woman in Southampton. (The Telegraph)

• 26^th February – Shafiullah Rasooli, an Afghan asylum seeker, jailed for three counts of sexual assault, against two women. Rasooli was illegally using his friend’s registration details to deliver food to customers, and assaulted the women on their doorstep. (The Telegraph)

• 25^th February – Hassan Mohamud and Abdrihman Abdihakim Ali, both Somali nationals, and Rotimi Adeyemo a Nigerian national, charged with jointly raping a woman in Belfast. (Belfast Live)

• 16^th February - Jowad Haji, an Iraqi national, charged with raping a woman in a shop in Stratford Upon Avon. A woman is alleged to have been raped, suffered an attempted rape, a sexual assault and suffered ‘intentional strangulation’ in the incident. (Birmingham Mail)

• 11^th February - Shahram Ibrehemi, an Iranian asylum seeker, jailed for repeatedly raping a 13-year-old girl while another man kept watch, after luring her back to a hotel room in Hull. (The Sun)

• 5^th February – Ahmadreza Khalafi, an Iranian refugee, jailed after sexually assaulting a teenager who was playing hide and seek with her friends on a night out in Bishop Stortford. (Daily Express)

• 2^nd February – Eid Anwar Fathi Najjar, a failed asylum seeker from Egypt, jailed for raping and sexually assaulting a woman he lured from a nightclub. The preliminary hearing was told that Najjar had entered the country illegally in a small boat in 2022, but although his asylum claim had been refused, the Immigration Services told him there was no plan to remove him from the country at that time. (BBC News)

• 30^th January – Deng Chol Majek, an asylum seeker from Sudan, jailed for life after murdering a woman who worked at the hotel at which he was staying. Deng Majek stabbed Rhiannon Whyte 23 times with a screwdriver in a frenzied 90-second attack after following the 27-year-old to Bescot Stadium railway station in Walsall. (BBC News)

• 26th January – Sheraz Malik, an asylum seeker born in Pakistan, found guilty of two counts of raping an 18-year-old woman in a park in Nottinghamshire. The woman had already been taken to an isolated area and raped by another man he was with, who has yet to be identified. The offence took place the year before last, but it was not until January of this year that it was legal to report that the perpetrator was an asylum seeker. Nottingham Crown Court had seen fit to place a reporting restriction on this crucial fact, with the defendant referred to in the press simply as a ‘man’.

• 21^st January – Melaku Gebresembet, an Ethiopian national, charged with sexual assault of a staff member at a Southampton hotel used to house asylum seekers. (Sky News)

• 13^th January - Sultani Bakatash, an Afghan national, appeared in court accused of raping two 14-year-old girls. Bakatash has been in the UK for two years and has been granted indefinite leave to remain, with his mother, two brothers and two sisters. (BBC News)

• 12^th January – Mehmet Ogur, a Kurdish asylum seeker from Turkey, jailed for raping an 18-year-old woman in a park after meeting her via a social media app. He was living at the Holiday Inn Express in Tamworth, at the time. (BBC News)

• 9^th January - Muqbil Al Dhaheri, a Yemeni asylum seeker, pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting a medical worker while receiving treatment at Broomfield Hospital in Chelmsford, as well as committing an act of public indecency, by urinating publicly during his return journey to the Wethersfield Immigration Centre where he was being housed. Al Dhaheri arrived in the UK four months before the incident. (GB News)

• 2^nd January – Abid Sherzad, an Afghan migrant, convicted of sexual assaulting a woman who fell asleep while eating pizza after a night out near London Bridge station. Sherzad arrived in the UK nine months before the attack and was staying in a taxpayer funded hotel in Oxford. (The Sun)

• 23^rd December – Rapualla Ahmadze, an Afghan asylum seeker, jailed for the rape of a teenage girl in a park in Elgin, Moray. Ahmadze was also convicted on a separate charge of threatening and abusive behaviour towards the same victim. (BBC News)

• 19^th December - Amer Mohammed, an Eritrean asylum seeker, jailed for a violent sexual assault on a woman walking alone along Margate seafront. (GB News)

• 16^th December – Nasratullah Wahidi, an Afghan migrant, jailed for assault of a family of five at a migrant camp, following an argument over a football. Wahidi pleaded guilty to causing grievous bodily harm with intent to the 16-year-old boy, intentional strangulation of the 15-year-old boy and the mother, and common assault against the 13-year-old boy and father. (The Telegraph)

• 15^th December – Abdulla Ali, an asylum seeker from Egypt, jailed for sexual assault after he performed a sex act on a woman who had collapsed after a night out in Gloucester. (Gloucestershire Police)

• 15^th December - Abdulmawal Ibrahim Adam, a Sudanese migrant, sentenced for attempting to kidnap a teenage girl in Swindon town centre. Footage from the scene shows him attempting to drag his victim across the road, before he was chased off by passengers in a passing bus. (The Telegraph). The BBC report on the 12^th Dec fails to mention his nationality.

• 9^th December - Hawre Mohamed, an asylum seeker from Iraq, jailed for sexually assaulting a woman, after following her onto a train. The offence happened three months after he entered the UK via small boat. (The Telegraph) (BBC News). The BBC report fails to mention his nationality, or the fact that he arrived via small boat.

• 11^th December – Chret Callender, a failed asylum seeker from Trinidad, found guilty of raping a woman in her own home. The offence took place while Callender was appealing the rejection of his asylum application, which he submitted after arriving on a visa. The man was being housed in a hotel by the Home Office at the time. (The Times)

• 8^th December – Jan Jahanzeb and Israr Niazal, teenage asylum seekers from Afghanistan, given custodial sentences for the abduction and rape of a 15-year-old girl in Leamington Spa. (BBC News). Initially, Warwickshire Police described the rapists as ‘two 17-year-old boys from Leamington’, while referring to their 15-year-old victim as a ‘young woman’. It was not until the case went to sentencing in December that their backgrounds could be reported, after a legal challenge by the Daily Mail was granted.

• 6^th December – Adam Ahmed, a Sudanese migrant, convicted of attempted murder this month after stabbing two of his neighbours, following a row over loud music. A court heard he had not shown a “trace of emotion” when he attacked one of them by driving a knife into the side of their neck. (The Sun)

• 5^th December – Muhammad Sheikhi, an asylum seeker staying in a hotel in Falkirk, appeared in court after being charged with two sexual assaults. An asylum seeker from Afghanistan staying in the same hotel had been jailed five months earlier for the rape of a 15-year-old girl. (The Telegraph)

• 14^th November - Abdolrahman Banafsha, an asylum seeker from Iran, sentenced for sexually assaulting a teenage student whilst walking home from a night out. Banafsha arrived in the UK by small boat five months before the offence took place. (Bristol Live)

• 14^th November - Mohammed Fathi Eltbie, a failed asylum seeker from Egypt, charged with raping a woman in a wooded area in Bournemouth. Eltbie’s asylum application had been refused 10 months before. (BBC News)

• 13^th November – Amin Abedi Mofrad, an Iranian asylum seeker who had been staying at an asylum hotel, jailed for the rape of a 15-year-old-girl near Oxford’s Westgate shopping centre. (BBC News)

Conclusion

We have borders and immigration laws for a reason. They are designed to keep dangerous individuals out of the country and remove those who have demonstrated themselves to be dangerous.

The public are not wrong to be angry about crimes committed by people who have abused this country’s hospitality. The snapshot above - from just a short period - shows how the system is failing.

Maximum transparency would be our first move - publishing all the data across the criminal justice system, the tribunals system and beyond. But that can only be the first step towards restoring trust.

The bottom line is that there are too many people being allowed to stay in our country who pose a risk to the public. Our ‘Borders Plan’, sets out the changes needed to fix this. This means leaving the ECHR and ECAT, repealing the Human Rights Act, and introducing a total ban on asylum claims for illegal entrants. Until we do these things, the list of horrors above - and public anger - are only going to grow.