Home Office under fire over bomber’s papers

New details have emerged about the Liverpool bomber Emad Al Swealmeen's failed asylum attempts.

A previously confidential 2015 asylum judgment reveals how his claim of being a Syrian refugee lacked basic facts about his home and the danger he faced. Al Swealmeen, an Iraqi, lost that case but the Home Office did not remove him before he tried again under a new name.

Al Swealmeen died when his bomb went off inside a taxi at Liverpool Women's Hospital on Remembrance Sunday in November. The driver, who escaped the vehicles seconds prior to it being engulfed in flames, did not suffer life-threatening injuries.

The papers, which show how he told obvious lies in an attempt to stay in the UK, raise further questions about why he was not removed from the UK before the attack.

He claimed to be fleeing from his native Syria, which was then in the grip of a worsening civil war. He said in a Home Office interview that he had then left out of fear for his life, returned to the UAE, where he had been living for 14 years, and flown on to the UK to claim asylum.

That flight, on a genuine Jordanian passport, came four months after he had already applied for a UK visa - meaning that British immigration officials had a copy of his fingerprints before he arrived.

When questioned closely about his travels,  Al Swealmeen couldn't explain why he had been in danger or describe his purported family's situation in Syria - such as basic facts about the geography of where they lived. An expert in Arabic also concluded that he was almost certainly Iraqi based on his speech.

Al Swealmeen was housed in Liverpool while he waited for a decision - which came in a rejection letter in November 2014. He then appealed - but did not attend the 2015 hearing in Manchester.

Instead of going, Al Swealmeen tried to appeal again in August 2015, failed, and then joined Liverpool Cathedral's course on the foundations of Christianity, presenting himself as a potential convert. He made a new asylum application under the name Enzo Almeni in 2017.

The Home Office eventually rejected this second application - but instead of being removed from the UK, Al Swealmeen again lodged an appeal in January 2021. That challenge was outstanding when he detonated his homemade bomb.