A migrant gang member convicted of manslaughter after the murder of an 18-year-old cannot be deported because of European Union rules, it has emerged.
Abdul Hafidah, 18, was murdered in front of rush hour commuters in Manchester in May 2016. The teenager, a childhood friend of Salman Abedi, the Manchester Arena bomber, was run over by a car and then stabbed in the neck.
The 10 men convicted of the killing included William George, 28, a semi-professional footballer.
George, a Belgian who moved to Britain with his parents at the age of eight, was jailed for 12 years for manslaughter for his part in the assault. In 2018 he was served with deportation papers, which said he had a “real risk” of reoffending.
Home Office officials have now lost a six-year legal battle to remove George from the UK, despite him being associated with Manchester’s notorious AO gang.
Under Brussels directives, which applied until Brexit, EU nationals who lived in Britain for an extended time could only be deported “on imperative grounds of public security”.
Court papers published this week showed judges concluded that George, who committed his criminal offence before the UK left the EU, did not meet the strict criteria for removal.
Dismissing an appeal by the Home Office against an earlier immigration court decision quashing his deportation, the Court of Appeal ruled that the threshold had not been reached.
Lord Justice Nicholas Underhill said George enjoyed “the highest level of protection against removal” as a European Economic Area (EEA) national and that there had been no “express misdirection of law”.
Hafidah, a member of the Rusholme Crips gang, was hunted down after he strayed into rival territory in the Moss Side area of Manchester.
George played a crucial role, his sentencing hearing was told, by confronting Hafidah and allowing others to catch up. The attackers beat the teenager, threw a hammer at him and struck him with a car, leading to his death from a knife wound to the neck.
Seven men were convicted of murder and jailed up for life. Three others, including George, were given manslaughter sentences.
Dismissing a Home Office deportation bid in 2023, an immigration tribunal ruled that George had expressed remorse and had “no intention of getting involved in any criminal offending in the future”.
Judge Bruce, sitting in Manchester, said: “William George was a promising footballer. He had moved away from home almost two years before this offence, having secured a semi-professional contract at Morecambe FC and a scholarship to Lancaster College.
“He had GSCEs, went straight from school up to Morecambe, had no criminal convictions and a part-time job in a restaurant. He had also worked coaching children football.
“He had, by all accounts, a good relationship with his parents, who had provided him with a stable and supportive home. That was his life until that afternoon in May 2016. His involvement in the killing of Mr Hafidah changed all of that.
“He has spent almost all of the past seven years in prison, and has only recently been released on licence. He is now living in a bail hostel some distance from his parents. He has no job and is not currently in education.
“He has had an extreme and profound education about the dangers of violence. When he says that he has no intention of getting involved in any criminal offending in the future, I believe him.”
The Home Office fought the decision at the Court of Appeal, where three judges found that the immigration tribunal had acted lawfully.
Lord Justice Underhill concluded: “Nothing in our decision means that we take anything but the most serious view of Mr George’s conduct. But he has been punished for that conduct by the sentence of 12 years’ imprisonment which he received.
“The question in this case is whether, in addition to that punishment, he should be deported to Belgium, where he has not lived since he was eight. The rule under the regulations is that that depends not, as such, on the seriousness of the offence but on whether he poses a sufficiently serious risk to public security in the future.
“The judge, after carefully weighing all the evidence, found that he does not. I must say that I find her reasoning convincing, but in any event it contains no error of law.”
Following Brexit, the Government no longer follows the EEA regulations. Non-British criminals are liable to be deported if they are given jail terms of 12 months or more.
The EEA regulations, adopted by the UK from a 2004 EU directive, had previously allowed the killer of the headteacher Philip Lawrence to stay in the UK.
Learco Chindamo was 15 when he stabbed Mr Lawrence to death outside his north London school in 1995. In 2007, Chindamo, an Italian national, won an appeal against deportation on the basis that he was from an EU country and had already lived in the UK for 10 years by 1995.
