An investigation is under way into why a former soldier accused of terrorism who is now on the run was held in a lower-security prison, a cabinet minister has said.
Michelle Donelan, the science secretary, said the government’s “top priority” was tracking down Daniel Khalife, who absconded from HMP Wandsworth on Wednesday morning by clinging to the bottom of a delivery van.
She said the investigation launched by the justice secretary, Alex Chalk, would look at “all the contributing factors” to discover how Khalife could have escaped, including “checking that he was in the correct facility”.
Khalife was on remand at HMP Wandsworth, a category B rather than a high-security prison, awaiting trial in relation to terrorism and Official Secrets Act offences.
Asked if overcrowding was the reason for Khalife not being held in a top-security category A prison such as Belmarsh, Donelan said it was “no secret” that prison capacity was an issue, but stressed ministers were working to fix the issue.
She told Times Radio: “It’s not as black and white, is my understanding, as to what category somebody under arrest for that those types of crimes should be in.”
Prisoner escapes remained “very rare”, Donelan told Sky News. She said she was confident that “a lot of lessons will be learned” as a result of the investigation into Khalife’s disappearance.
Despite Labour linking the escape to wider concerns about overcrowding in prisons and staff shortages, Donelan added: “I don’t think you can join the dots between the two.”
She also said the small number of prison escapes were “not incomparable” with the figures during the last Labour government. “We shouldn’t politicise the topic,” she later told LBC.
Prof Ian Acheson, a former prison governor and head of security at HMP Wandsworth, called it a “catastrophic system failure that actually starts with the allocation of Khalife to Wandsworth”.
Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Acheson said: “It’s pretty odd, because what you would expect in terms of the allocation process is that somebody who was charged with terrorist offences under the Official Secrets Act, who’s an alleged fake bomb maker and is collecting information of use to terrorists, all of that package would lead you – I think reasonably – to conclude that this person is a flight risk, is an escape risk. And the place that he should have ended up in by all estimations is Belmarsh prison.”
Acheson said there had been “multiple breaches of human and physical security” at HMP Wandsworth, but said that it, like others, was “in freefall”.
He said the prison was filthy, infested with vermin, and that “on any day, up to 44% of frontline staff are unavailable to work”. “Morale is awful. I mean, frankly, if you can’t even get the bins emptied at a place like Wandsworth, what else is going on?” Acheson added.
“So many of our prisons at the moment are understaffed. The staff that work there are demoralised and in a kind of death spiral.”
Khalife, who was awaiting trial after allegedly planting a fake bomb at an RAF base and gathering information that could be useful to terrorists or enemies of the UK, was discharged from the army in May 2023. He has denied the three charges against him.
He was last seen wearing a white T-shirt, red and white checked trousers and brown steel toecap boots, the Metropolitan police said. He is described as being slim, 1.88 metres (6ft 2in) tall, with short brown hair.
The head of Scotland Yard’s counter-terrorism command, Commander Dominic Murphy, said there was “no reason to believe Khalife poses a threat to the wider public”. But Murphy urged people not to approach the terrorism suspect and to call 999 if they spotted him.
