By Andrew Young,David Barrett,Editor

Copyright dailymail

The Home Office was last night under intense pressure to explain how an asylum seeker’s terrorism conviction was missed – leaving him free to rape a woman in London’s Hyde Park.

Egyptian Abdelrahmen Adnan Abouelela was found guilty of being part of a bomb-making cell in his home country and given a seven-year jail sentence on May 5, 2015.

As revealed on dailymail.co.uk yesterday, the 42-year-old was a member of the radical Muslim Brotherhood movement and escaped Egypt before being convicted.

In 2023, he came to Britain in the back of a lorry, claimed asylum and was housed in a taxpayer-funded Hilton hotel while his application was considered.

Despite details of Abouelela’s terrorism conviction being publicly available in Egypt, Home Office officials spent more than a year deciding whether to grant him asylum.

Abouelela then raped a vulnerable woman in Hyde Park last November. He was convicted at Southwark Crown Court in May and jailed for eight and a half years on Tuesday.

John Vine, the former chief inspector of borders and immigration, said: ‘It looks like any checks of international criminal databases, if they have been made at all, have failed.

‘The Home Office needs to look very carefully at how it accessed any databases in countries the individual came through. It needs to be urgently looking at its processes.’

He added that identifying migrants with criminal records is ‘one of the core jobs of the Home Office’.

Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp said: ‘The Home Office needs to urgently look at this case and find out what went wrong.

‘This sick case shows how our immigration legal system is broken.

‘Men like this exploit human rights, asylum and modern slavery laws to stay in the UK, exposing women to the risk of rape and our country to the risk of terrorism.’

He added: ‘That is why we need to get rid of the Human Rights Act for immigration matters and immediately deport all illegal immigrants – but this Government run by human rights lawyers is too weak to do it.’

Abouelela and six other men were said to have manufactured explosives in a safehouse flat to carry out ‘terrorist’ acts including bombing electricity pylons and gas lines.

Court records in Egypt reveal that Abouelela and his six accomplices rented an apartment in the Tenth of Ramadan City, east of Cairo, where they made the bombs.

After escaping Egypt it is understood that Abouelela spent time in Malaysia and Sudan before claiming asylum in Turkey.

There, he was detained for at least 72 days at Istanbul’s Ataturk airport after his request was reportedly turned down by Turkish authorities in early 2019.

Abouelela battled attempts to extradite him to Egypt before Turkish authorities are said to have relented and allowed him to stay.

In a video posted online during his detention, he stated in Arabic that he was a member of the Egyptian ‘opposition’. He added: ‘I don’t know what will happen to me.’

Abouelela’s membership of the Muslim Brotherhood or an affiliate group was revealed in a 2019 report about his detention in Turkey by the Saudi news channel Al Arabiya.

During his time in Turkey, he repeatedly posted religious messages on Facebook and openly criticised the regime of Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.

In one post, he described members of the Muslim Brotherhood as his ‘brothers’ while another described how he had been briefly imprisoned in Egypt in 2015 by the ‘dogs’ of the el-Sisi regime.

The group is regarded as a terror organisation in many countries but is not banned in the UK.

Abouelela came to Britain as a clandestine migrant – hidden in the back of a lorry – in April 2023 and claimed asylum. He was given taxpayer-funded accommodation at a four-star Hilton hotel in Ealing, west London.

While his application was considered Abouelela was allowed to wander freely and even posted a selfie in January last year outside the Imperial War Museum North in Manchester.

He claimed he would face persecution if he was deported to Egypt. The trial at Southwark Crown Court heard he approached his victim as she walked home alone from a night out at around 9pm, before luring her to a secluded spot in Hyde Park and raping her.

Judge Gregory Perrins told Abouelela: ‘You were driven purely by your own sexual desires. You simply did not care that she could not consent.’

The judge commended the victim, who cannot be named for legal reasons, for her ‘immense bravery and courage’ in giving evidence during the trial.

Abouelela faces automatic deportation under the UK Borders Act 2007 after serving his sentence for rape as he will have been in jail for more than a year.

However, he may attempt a legal challenge on the grounds that deportation would breach his rights under the European Convention on Human Rights or the UK’s obligations under the Refugee Convention.

In April 2023 – the same month Abouelela arrived in Britain – the Daily Mail revealed that 19 terrorist suspects had reached the UK by small boat during 2022.

They included five linked with Islamic State or its offshoots, security sources said.

Seven were already under ‘active investigation’ in other countries when they arrived here. Some went on to lodge asylum claims. In September last year Tory MP Robert Jenrick, who had resigned as immigration minister nine months earlier, said dozens of terror suspects had come to Britain by small boat and ‘waltzed right in’.

Referring to Abouelela, a Home Office spokesman said: ‘When foreign nationals commit serious crimes in our country, we will always do everything in our power to deport them.