A dual British-Nigerian national convicted of abducting his young son is now a fugitive after being accidentally released from a London prison, in what a judge has condemned as a catastrophic failure by the British state.
Ifedayo Adedapo Kolawoe Adeyeye walked free from HMP Pentonville on April 21, 2026 — not through any legal entitlement, but through a clerical error that prison authorities failed to catch for two full days.
Adeyeye had been serving a six-month sentence for contempt of court after defying a court order to return his five-year-old son, Laurys, to the boy’s mother in France. On April 20 just one day before his erroneous release — he was handed an additional 12-month sentence for further contempt. That second sentence was never properly entered into the prison’s record system. The following morning, staff released him as though he were a free man.
By the time authorities realized the mistake on April 23, Adeyeye had a two-day head start. He also faces extradition proceedings to France, making his disappearance all the more alarming.
A High Court judge had previously ruled that Adeyeye abducted Laurys from his mother, Claire N’Djosse, in France in July 2024 and smuggled the child to Nigeria describing it as a case falling into “the most serious class.” Ms. N’Djosse has not laid eyes on her son in nearly two years.
The judge did not mince words when addressing the state’s handling of the crisis. He described Adeyeye as “a dangerous threat to his son’s physical and emotional welfare” and “entirely dishonest,” and warned that keeping him behind bars was “the best, perhaps the only, hope of reunification of this boy with his mother.”
He went further, expressing serious doubt about whether police fully grasped the gravity of the situation, citing an “alarming lack of urgency” and bluntly declaring: “The state has failed.”
In a rare move, the judge authorized the public release of both Adeyeye’s and the child’s identities to aid in the search. “When the state fails in the way that it has done here,” he said, “there is a public interest in that being put in the public domain.”
Police say they were formally notified on April 24 and have since launched urgent efforts to locate Adeyeye and return him to custody. As of now, both he and little Laurys remain missing.
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