The woman left seriously injured in the Clapham chemical attack came to Britain for safety as an asylum seeker from Afghanistan, the Guardian has learned, as police offered a £20,000 reward for the capture of the suspected assailant.
Abdul Ezedi remains the target of a huge manhunt after Wednesday’s attack with the corrosive substance, after which he went on the run.
Ezedi, also from Afghanistan, was granted asylum despite a previous conviction for sex offences committed in the UK in 2018 and while being on the sex offender register.
Former home secretaries, Suella Braverman and Priti Patel, have tried to use Ezedi’s controversial asylum status to call for a crackdown on asylum seekers.
However, multiple sources have said the woman, 31, who is still seriously ill in hospital, herself came to the UK seeking asylum status – which is believed to have been granted after it was accepted she had a genuine fear of persecution in Afghanistan.
They add it is believed she arrived in the UK after Ezedi, who was smuggled into the country in a lorry in 2016.
Detectives have said that anyone found assisting him while he is on the run faces arrest, and believe there are people concealing his location.
Commander Jon Savell said on Sunday that laboratory analysis showed the liquid used in the attack had been “a very strong concentrated corrosive substance, either liquid sodium hydroxide or liquid sodium carbonate”.
He said comparisons were being carried out with containers seized from Ezedi’s Newcastle home.
The injured woman, who was previously known to Ezedi, is in a critical but stable condition in hospital having suffered what are likely to be life-changing injuries.
Some sources say the woman and suspect had been in some sort of relationship, but the two children with her at the time of the attack, aged eight and three, are not his.
Azedi said he was of Hazara ethnicity as he tried to win asylum, which was eventually granted on his third attempt by an appeals tribunal after a priest gave evidence he was regularly attending church and his claim to be a Christian was genuine.
Two of the sources added that Afghanistan was assessed as being so dangerous that once Ezedi had got into the UK, he could not be deported even if all his appeals had failed.
Police have had no confirmed sightings of Ezedi since Wednesday evening, despite the large manhunt and highly publicised appeals for information on his whereabouts.
Thanking the public for the calls already received, Savell said: “Your help is critical. A reward of up to £20,000 is now available for information leading to his arrest.
“I must warn anyone who is helping Ezedi to evade capture, if you are harbouring or assisting him then you will be arrested.
“Our inquiry line is staffed 24/7 by specialist detectives who are progressing inquiries around the clock.
“If you know where he is or have information that may assist call them now.”
Police released fresh information on Sunday about Ezedi’s last known movements. He was last seen at 9.33pm on Wednesday, when he left Tower Hill underground station.
He had changed trains at Victoria, where he had arrived on the Victoria line at 9.10pm and departed on the eastbound District line at 9.16pm. Officers previously said the last sighting of him had been on a southbound Victoria line train from King’s Cross at 9pm, 95 minutes after the Clapham attack.
The woman’s daughters were also injured in the attack, although their injuries are not as serious as first thought. A City worker said the younger child was saved by his partner, a finance worker in her 50s, who ran out of the house when she heard screaming.
He told the Sunday Times the attacker went to throw the three-year-old to the ground again “which is when my partner lunged in and tackled him, grabbing his leg and falling to the ground in the process like a rugby tackle”.
The witness said he had arm injuries, and that his partner had suffered burns and might have permanent damage to her eyes.
As the police made a fresh plea for information and announced the reward, Darius Nasimi, of the Afghanistan and Central Asian Association, a charity, made a direct appeal to Ezedi to hand himself in.
“I want you to go straight to a police station immediately,” he said. “You have a serious injury that needs to be seen to but, more importantly, you must do the right thing and hand yourself in to police. This has gone on for long enough.”
The association’s founder, Dr Nooralhaq Nasimi, said it had not had any previous contact with Ezedi or the victims of Wednesday’s attack.
Writing in the Sunday Telegraph, Suella Braverman said that during her time as home secretary she “became aware of churches around the country facilitating industrial-scale bogus asylum claims”.
Priti Patel told the Telegraph that church leaders had engaged in “political activism”, claiming that religious institutions supported cases of asylum seekers “without merit”.
It is not known which church he attended. The Church of England said there was no record of him on its books and that it was for the Home Office to vet asylum seekers.
