Judge criticizes prison after man freed before extradition to France

A prisoner slated for extradition to France was mistakenly released from HMP Pentonville in north London even though he still had a year left to serve, exposing a breakdown in sentence calculation, notification procedures and cross-border enforcement.

Ifedayo Adedapo Kolawole Adeyeye was freed on 21 April 2026 after being jailed for contempt of court in a case tied to the abduction of his five-year-old son, Laurys N’Djosse Adeyeye, from France to Nigeria. Court documents say he was due to be handed over to French authorities once the 12-month sentence ended, but prison staff did not alert police for three days after realizing he had gone. By the time officers were told, the High Court was informed on 1 May 2026 that he may already have left the UK and could be abroad, with Spain named as a possible destination.

Mr Justice Hayden said in the High Court that the public is entitled to expect far better. The case showed how a single mistaken release can quickly become an international search when prison records, police notification and immigration or border checks do not move fast enough to contain the error.

The underlying family case has stretched across several jurisdictions. DNA testing in June 2021 confirmed that Adeyeye was Laurys’s biological father, and he was later granted parental responsibility. In October 2023, a French court awarded the child’s mother, Claire Mireille N’Djosse, sole custody and ordered progressively increasing contact for Adeyeye. Instead, the matter escalated into contempt proceedings after he failed to return the child to France by 4 pm on 23 March 2026.

The mistaken release has also sharpened scrutiny of Pentonville itself. HM Inspectorate of Prisons had already identified serious sentence-calculation failings at the jail and later issued an urgent notification in July 2025. That warning now looks more consequential in light of official Ministry of Justice data showing 179 recorded releases in error in prisons across England and Wales between 1 April 2025 and 31 March 2026.

The episode raises a larger question for HM Prison and Probation Service and Scotland Yard: how a prisoner who should still have been in custody, and who was subject to extradition arrangements, was able to leave a London prison and remain unaccounted for long enough to trigger an apparent cross-border manhunt.