At time of writing, Abdul Ezedi is still at large, somewhere in the north of England. Ezedi is wanted in connection with an acid attack in London that left a woman with “life-threatening injuries” and seriously harmed her two daughters, aged three and eight. A number of bystanders who attempted to intervene were also injured. One brave woman had acid thrown in her eyes, and may yet lose her sight. Ezedi fled the scene and arrived in Newcastle, where he had been living, by train. The manhunt continues.

As more and more details surrounding the case have emerged, public outrage has grown. In case you hadn’t guessed from his name, Mr Ezedi is not British. He’s a migrant, probably from the Middle East by the looks of things; although he could just as easily have crawled out from under a stone or a wet log or direct from a little girl’s nightmares.

Ezedi’s story is becoming an increasingly familiar one. He first entered Britain illegally in 2016, in the back of a lorry, and made two unsuccessful appeals for asylum, the second of which was rejected in 2018 after he was convicted of sexual assault and indecent exposure. He received a suspended sentence and was placed on the sex offenders’ register for ten years. In 2020, however, his third application was successful, after he claimed to have converted from Islam to Christianity. A priest from the Church of England vouched for Ezidi and said that his conversion was “sincere,” and this appears to have made the difference. Ezidi was then housed and fed for two years by Action Foundation, a Christian charity that receives hundreds of thousands of pounds of government funding—taxpayer money—a year to help migrants settle in Britain.

There’s a lot to unpack here. But what’s at issue, beyond a shadow of a doubt, is immigration and its effects on British society.