The High Court has issued an urgent plea to find a father who vanished after being accidentally released from prison—while his kidnapped son remains missing.
Ifedayo Adeyeye, 57, walked free from custody on April 21. Prison staff didn’t realize their catastrophic mistake until two days later, on April 23.
Adeyeye, a dual British-Nigerian national, had snatched his own son, Laurys, from the boy’s mother in France back in July 2024. The abduction was no petty crime—a judge called it "in the most serious class of cases."
Laurys’s mother, Claire N’Djosse, hasn’t laid eyes on her son since that agonizing day. Now, with the father on the loose, her nightmare deepens.
Justice Hayden didn’t mince words: Adeyeye is a "dangerous threat to his son’s physical and emotional welfare." He called the father "entirely dishonest" and declared that keeping him locked up was "the best, perhaps the only, hope of reunification of this boy with his mother."
The timeline is chilling. On July 27, 2024, Laurys spent his first overnight visit with his father. Instead of returning him, Adeyeye flew the boy to Nigeria via the UK.
The engineer eventually returned to Britain, where he was arrested and handed a six-month prison sentence for failing to bring Laurys back. But his jail term ended far too soon—thanks to an error that now threatens everything.
The case took an even darker turn when a Nigerian court, without the mother’s knowledge or consent, granted parental responsibility for Laurys to two people believed to be Adeyeye’s relatives. The legal web spans nations, leaving Claire N’Djosse trapped in a nightmare with no end in sight.
Scotland Yard confirmed they were alerted by the Prison Service around 1 p.m. on April 24 that Adeyeye had been mistakenly freed. Officers are now racing against time, "carrying out urgent inquiries in an effort to locate him and return him to custody."
A Ministry of Justice spokesperson admitted the blunder: "We understand the distress that releases in error can cause to victims and their families." They blamed "years of underinvestment" and vowed to invest millions in digital systems and biometrics to stop such failures.
But for Claire N’Djosse, no investment can undo the terror of not knowing where her son is—or if she’ll ever hold him again.
