Dozens of asylum-seeking children disappeared in Britain under mysterious circumstances, amid reports that they had been kidnapped by criminal gangs, according to an investigation by the newspaper.Guardian” British.
The children were kidnapped from a hotel run by the Home Office in Brighton, Sussex (southeast Britain), in a pattern that appears to be repeated across the kingdom’s south coast.
According to some of those reporting on these cases, the children were kidnapped from the street outside the hotel and put in cars, and most of them have not been found yet.
It emerged that the UK Home Office had been repeatedly warned that asylum-seeking children who had recently arrived in the UK without parents or carers would be targeted by “criminal networks”.
Over the past 18 months, some 600 unaccompanied asylum-seeking children have lived in the hotel and 136 of them have been reported missing.
More than half of these, equivalent to 79 children, are still missing, according to the Guardian.
Some of the missing children may have been trafficked as far away as Manchester and Scotland, and one case is under investigation by the Metropolitan Police in London.
Labour’s shadow home secretary, Yvette Cooper, described it as “truly appalling and scandalous” and called on the British government to reveal how many children had disappeared and what was being done to find them.
“There is a complete failure in the performance of the Ministry of Interior,” she said, adding, “Ministers must urgently put in place new protection arrangements.”
The British newspaper reported similar cases of the disappearance of children from a hotel run by the Home Office in Kent, southeast England.
And in October 2022, it was revealed data 222 unaccompanied asylum seekers went missing from hotels run by the British Home Office.
The ministers admitted at the time that they had no idea of their whereabouts, according to the Guardian.
Meanwhile, it also emerged that no new directives had been issued for the police to track down missing asylum-seeking children.
