The Warwickshire Police force has rejected claims that it engaged in a “cover-up” of the immigration status of two Afghan suspects who allegedly raped a 12-year-old girl, claiming that the information was withheld due to “national guidance”.
A report over the weekend from the Mail on Sunday named the two suspects as Ahmad Mulakhil and Mohammad Kabir and revealed that they were asylum seekers living in taxpayer-funded accommodations in Nuneaton. The MoS went on to claim that local police had told officials not to divulge the immigration status of the suspects for fear of “inflaming community tensions”.
Warwickshire council leader George Finch, of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party, accused the local police of engaging in a “cover-up” and warned that withholding the truth from the public represented a greater risk of stoking tensions.
In an open letter to the council leader, Chief Constable Alex Franklin-Smith denied responsibility for the decision, suggesting that he was merely following orders from the national left-wing Labour Party government on whether to withhold the immigration status of suspects.
Recounting a conversation he had with the 19-year-old Finch — the UK’s youngest council leader — CC Franklin-Smith said: “You informed me you had already received a confidential briefing from your Chief Executive and that you knew the person charged was an asylum seeker,” he wrote.
“I confirmed this was accurate and we wouldn’t be releasing immigration status at point of charge as we follow national guidance.”
Despite the immigration status of the two Afghan asylum seekers suspected of being rapists having first been published in the Mail on Sunday, the Warwickshire police chief accused Councillor Finch of putting their information into the public domain.
On Wednesday morning, the Reform UK politician said that he had contacted the force demanding a correction, which he said they shut down.
“I reiterate my demand for a retraction and an apology from Warwickshire Police without delay,” Finch wrote on X.
The issue of the government withholding information on the ethnicity and immigration status of criminal suspects and offenders has become a major flashpoint in the debate surrounding mass migration, and particularly around the government’s scheme to put up so-called asylum seekers in commandeered hotels and rented homes across the country.
Last month, The Sun newspaper reported that Portsmouth Council had also allegedly covered up that a man charged with rape in the area was a migrant living in a hotel in the area for fear of stoking “community tensions.”
Amid the growing controversy, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper — the government minister tasked with controlling immigration — said on Wednesday that the government was planning to issue new guidance for police to provide more “transparency” in revealing the nationality and asylum status of criminal suspects.
According to the Times of London, citing government sources, the Home Office’s upcoming policy will be aimed at helping “rebuild public trust.”
Warwickshire police and crime commissioner Philip Seccombe urged for the guidance to be published as soon as possible, saying that police forces are “in an invidious position when deciding what can and should be disclosed in sensitive cases, given that the national guidance is silent on both the ethnicity and immigration status of suspects.”
The government may have a long way to go to rebuild trust and to reverse the apparent impulse amongst its ranks to downplay the issues of mass migration.
Indeed, separately this week, the police and crime commissioner for Hampshire and the Isle of Wight, Donna Jones, claimed that a Labour government minister urged her to retract comments linking anger over migration to last year’s riots.
The unrest, which broke out after a second-generation migrant from Rwanda killed three young girls at a dance party in Southport, saw migrant hotels specifically targeted during the rioting.
PCC Jones said that an unnamed Labour minister had told her that the riots had “nothing to do with immigration” and told her to retract her comments. Jones, who refused, told The Times that the incident belied how “out of touch” the government is with the sentiment of the public, and warned therefore it may be unable to contain the current anti-migrant hotel protests from escalating and driving parts of the country into a “state of lawlessness”.
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