Churches risk undermining asylum system after Clapham attacker’s conversion, says Home Office

The Clapham chemical attacker was granted asylum despite the Home Office warning that he had failed a Christianity test and was “using religion for his own ends”.

Newly released documents show an immigration judge accepted Abdul Ezedi’s conversion as genuine even though he could not answer basic Home Office questions about Christianity and was found to have repeatedly lied about his background.

Ezedi claimed that the Old Testament was about Jesus Christ and that one of the disciples was called Jacob in a series of blunders during a Home Office interview to test the validity of his conversion.

The documents also reveal Ezedi, 35, a convicted sex offender, was allowed to continue attending his adopted baptist church under a special safeguarding contract requiring that he was supervised at all times.

Ezedi, an Afghan who came to the UK illegally in 2016, died in the River Thames while on the run after attacking a 31-year-old mother and her two daughters with a corrosive substance near Clapham Common on Jan 31.

He was granted asylum by an immigration tribunal judge on his third appeal in November 2020 after he claimed he had converted to Christianity and would be persecuted if he returned to Afghanistan.

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