Sima KotechaSenior UK correspondent
PA Media
Two prisoners are still at large after being mistakenly freed last year, the BBC understands.
Another two, who were set free in error in June 2025, also remain missing.
Details of the four erroneously released prisoners are emerging as ministers face growing pressure over a number of high-profile mistaken releases.
Two other men who were released in error from HMP Wandsworth are now back in custody after high-profile police manhunts this week, after a migrant sex offender was mistakenly set free in late October.
Algerian sex offender Brahim Kaddour-Cherif was arrested on Friday, while William Smith handed himself back in at the south London prison on Thursday.
Hadush Kebatu, who arrived in the UK on a small boat and was jailed for sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl and a woman while living in an asylum hotel, was mistakenly released from HMP Chelmsford in Essex. He was subsequently recaptured and deported.
Some 262 prisoners in England and Wales were mistakenly freed in the year to March – up from 115 the previous year.
The names of the four still missing, as well as why they were imprisoned and the reason for their mistaken release, remain unclear.
A Ministry of Justice (MoJ) spokesperson told the BBC: “The vast majority of offenders released by mistake are quickly brought back to prison, and we will do everything we can to work with the police to capture the few still in the community.”
Earlier, shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick had said the unaccounted prisoners
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