Scandal of the migrant criminals: How legal lunancy left serial sex offender free to kill girl, 12

What a place to be if he is a paedophile. On that Sunday morning a few weeks ago, children had flocked to the funfair in Milton Keynes, where Hungarian-born Balazs Asztalos helped to run the popular bungee jump ride.

A polite young man, who had been offered work during the busy half-term holiday, he had seemed no different to any of the thousands of Eastern European migrants seeking employment in Britain. Not until a car full of Thames Valley police officers turned up.

They were responding to a phone call from a worried local who had spotted Asztalos from his photograph, which was part of a new Crimestoppers' campaign aimed at capturing 'most wanted' foreign fugitives in Britain.

Thousands of miles away in Asztalos' home town of Tolna, 80 miles south of the Hungarian capital Budapest, police suspect this quiet, unassuming young man of raping a four-year-old girl before fleeing in May 2006 and slipping into this country.

They want to quiz him and if charged he will be put on trial. If found guilty, he will face a ten-year sentence.

Which is why, just 24 hours after police took him into custody in Milton Keynes, Asztalos found himself in the dock of England's extradition court in the London borough of Westminster.

The slow process of trying to send him home to face the police had just begun. But as we shall see, this is not only extraordinarily complicated and time-consuming, it is very often doomed to failure. Moreover, his case is simply one among thousands.

In the year to April, Britain received more than 3,500 requests from foreign countries for the return of their criminals. More than 150 were suspected or convicted murderers. The astonishing total was up by a quarter on the previous 12 months.

The vast majority of the 'wanted' suspects hailed from European Union countries. As Detective Chief Inspector Murray Duffin, of the Scotland Yard Extradition and Intelligence Unit, has warned: 'Britain is becoming a magnet for increasing numbers of criminals from the former Eastern bloc countries which are now members of the EU.' 

Notably, the number of fugitives being sought by Poland has soared 14-fold since 2004, when the country joined the EU and its citizens were allowed to live in Britain. The Warsaw police now send a charter plane to Britain every month to pick up their countrymen wanted for killings, rape, robbery, burglary, drugs and theft. Last year, officers from the extradition unit returned 275 Poles accused of crimes back home.

Even the police chief of Albania - which is not an EU member - has warned that Britain has become the favourite sanctuary for fugitives. He recently claimed that the UK is harbouring 80 Albanian killers and 20 other serious offenders. Many have got British citizenship after deceiving our authorities and claiming asylum by pretending to be from war-torn Kosovo.

So why does our extradition system take so long to send back the suspected foreign criminals found here? And what are the implications for our own safety as rapists and murderers freely walk our streets? 

In London, a fifth of all offences, a third of all sex attacks and half of all frauds are committed by those born overseas. In the West Midlands, the number of foreigners accused of crimes doubled to 3,700 in the five years up to 2008. In the country as a whole, drinkdriving convictions of foreigners have shot up 17 times. And it is hard not to suspect that many of them will have had criminal records before they came to Britain.

For as one London senior police officer told me: 'A criminal doesn't stop being a criminal just because he moves country - and that is the real problem. Our first call when we get an extradition request from a foreign country is to the British prison authorities, because that is where they are often to be found.' 

Indeed, about 5 per cent of all extradition requests concern suspects who have already been jailed for offences committed in the UK.

Many have arrived here illicitly, smuggling themselves into Britain hidden in lorries arriving from Calais, Dunkirk and Boulogne, or on trains through the Channel tunnel.

This week the Home Office said that last year 28,000 foreigners clandestinely tried to enter the country by these routes. 'Inevitably, some are running away from their own justice system,' explained the police officer.

The trouble is, by the time foreign criminals are successfully tracked down it's often too late. In one horrific case, schoolgirl Katerina Koneva, 12, was strangled at her home in Hammersmith, West London, by Andrezej Kunowski, who had spent 15 years in jail in his native Poland for serial sex offences.

The 51-year-old was awaiting trial in his home country for further sex attacks when, in June 1996, he was freed on bail for urgent medical treatment and absconded, travelling to Britain under a tourist visa. (Poland was not yet a member of the EU.)

He murdered Katerina a year later, and although the Polish authorities continued to seek his extradition, Kunowski remained at large in the UK for six years after her death. It was only when he was arrested for the rape of a 22-year-old student from London that police were able to use the DNA samples they had taken to link him to Katerina's killing.

He is serving life in prison in Britain and is unlikely ever to be released - which means that he will never face justice in his own country.

Yet shocking though his case is, there are many more like him still at large in Britain. In fact, only a fraction of those suspected of crimes in their home country and traced to Britain are ever successfully extradited.

Of the 3,526 foreigners for whom extradition requests were made by European Union countries in the past year, 683 were arrested and only one in seven - 516 - returned, according to the latest figures released to the Mail by the Serious Organised Crime Agency.

As for those from outside the EU, the Home Office says that of the 300 'wanted' by the rest of the world since 2003, a third escaped extradition and remain here. There are a myriad legal loopholes to sidestep removal.

The suspects' lawyers often claim - successfully - that their clients will suffer human rights abuse or will not face a fair trial back home. The extradition process can be dragged out for years if suspects appeal to the High Court and then up again to the Home Secretary. If they come from outside the EU, many instantly claim asylum. This request has then to be considered by the courts before the extradition process can even begin.

In a further twist, those accused of offences carrying the death penalty in their home country cannot - by our law - be returned because Britain has abolished capital punishment.

This begs the question of whether the most dangerous foreign criminals are deliberately settling here because they are safe from extradition.

The situation is even more complicated if the suspected foreign criminal has a wife and children in this country. Under the Human Rights Act 1998, they can fight removal, claiming their family life would be disrupted.

The crisis was highlighted earlier this month with the Crimestoppers' campaign to track down foreign criminals here. The 16 named suspects were mainly from Eastern Europe (eight from Albania alone) and included six rapists and six murderers.

Lord Ashcroft, who founded Crimestoppers, said: 'Fugitives hide across the globe in all communities. When you look at the criminals that are on the most wanted list, they can be truly horrible people and need to be caught.'

To speed the extradition process, new laws on sending criminals back to Europe were passed in 2003. However, over four days in court, I saw a score of foreigners using every twist and turn in the law to fight removal.

Take Fred Undrits, who is wanted in Estonia for burning down a house. The 23-year-old was brought to the extradition hearing from prison, where he is serving a 56-day sentence for shoplifting. He has been in Britain since 2006 and his case might take years to decide.

And what of Albanian Shkelzen Gradica? The 33-year-old has changed his name to Robert and was convicted in his absence in Italy of attempted murder. His defence team argue it could breach his human rights to be sent to Rome because he would not get a fair trial.

The reason? Gradica was convicted on the basis of an unreliable witness statement and has never had the chance to answer the allegations against him in an Italian courtroom.

From Poland, Maciej Blaszko, 30, has been accused in Warsaw of attempted robbery and driving while disqualified. Here he has been fighting extradition with a team of lawyers paid for with legal aid funded by the British taxpayer.

Blaszko says he won't get a fair trial back home because the police case against him was prepared when he had fled the country for the UK.

And then there was paedophile Julius Horvath, convicted in 1996 of the sexual assault and rape of a child in the Czech Republic.

Horvath slipped through our borders and came to Britain in 2000. Despite his dubious past, he successfully claimed asylum. Living in a one-bed council flat in Leeds, he even received job seekers' allowance. The 54-year old has also had numerous run-ins with police here, according to evidence given at the extradition hearing.

In the past four years, the Czech has been cautioned for affray, being drunk and disorderly, serious assault and shoplifting. Luckily for him, he has one son living here, and four grandchildren who were born here, which means the chances of him ever going home are slim indeed. Why? His lawyers say that a return would infringe his 'family life' under Article 8 of the Human Rights Act.

And then there was the suspected Hungarian paedophile Balazs Asztalos. He made a second appearance at the extradition court ten days after he was found by police in Milton Keynes. His employers, S and D Leisure, admitted they did not have a clue their polite young employee was a suspected child molester.

'We were really amazed when he was arrested,' said company owner Stanley Reeves. 'If we'd had the slightest inkling he was on the run from police we never would have given him a job.'

The family-run company, which operates bungee rides all over the country, had taken down Asztalos' details from his passport and started to run a police criminal record check on him.

Now Mr Reeves is questioning how Asztalos had not been tracked down to Britain before. He arrived in Britain in 2006. In the extradition court, Asztalos' shoulder-length hair was swept back from his face with gel, and he looked completely different to the shavenheaded figure who had appeared in the Crimestoppers photograph.

But already there are nagging doubts about whether he can ever be returned. The court heard that the Hungarian police have questioned three other people - including Asztalos' own mother - in connection with child sex abuse in his home town. Defence barrister Martin Henley told the extradition court the trio had all been released without charge.

And then Mr Henley announced his bombshell. He said that under British laws the extradition request was useless if Asztalos was wanted only for interviews by Hungarian police and was not, thus far, subject to a fullblown arrest warrant.

While inquiries are made about exactly what the situation is, the young Hungarian will remain in prison.

Asztalos is innocent until proven guilty, but there are countless other foreign crooks and deviants with dubious pasts who are making Britain an infinitely more unsafe place for decent people to live in. It is a scandal of terrifying proportions.

Scandal of the migrant criminals: High Court frees Somali thug Britain couldn't deport

The country's shambolic immigration laws were under the spotlight yesterday after the High Court ordered the release of a prolific criminal who has been fighting deportation for three years.

A judge ruled that the 'undesirable' immigrant, who 'embarked on a criminal career' in the UK and still poses a threat of further offending, must be freed from detention.

The High Court was told Ahmed Daq, 32, must be released on bail because the Home Office has already held him for three years to facilitate his removal from the UK but there is still no prospect of deportation.

A judge ruled: 'Removal is not going to be possible within a reasonable time. Therefore his detention has become unlawful.'

Daq, an alcoholic and drug addict, committed 18 offences between 1998 and 2004, using 13 aliases. They included robbery, assault and burglary.

He was due to be released in June 2006 but was immediately served with a further notice of intention to deport, and detained pending removal.

He had been in custody ever since, challenging moves to deport him to Somalia in the Court of Appeal.

Over the past three years, he has been repeatedly in trouble for violent outbursts against other inmates, and detectives fear he will be a menace on the streets.

His latest appeal hearing has been delayed as the legal debate continues over whether it is safe to return criminals and failed asylum seekers to the violent and war-torn east African state.

Deputy High Court judge John Howell QC, sitting in London, observed: 'This case is a sad reminder of the continuing difficulties in securing the removal of foreign nationals who commit criminal offences in this country which make their continued presence here undesirable.'

He granted Daq bail 'subject to stringent conditions' to guard against the risk of him reoffending or absconding.

He observed: 'There is plainly the risk of him reoffending, but the type of offence he may commit is not in my judgment of the most grave kind, though serious they undoubtedly are.'

The judge described how Daq arrived in the UK in 1997 and claimed asylum as a Somali national who feared for his life in his home country. The judge said the possibility of his having Kenyan connections was now also being explored.

Daq was granted exceptional leave to remain for one year and then applied for an extension, but no decision was made on that application.

The judge said: 'Meanwhile he embarked on a criminal career in this country.' The offences included robbery, theft, two assaults causing actual bodily harm, possession of an offensive weapon - an axe - using threatening words and behaviour, and seven burglaries.

One burglary was committed after he had been served with a notice of deportation in 2004, for which he received a two-and-a-half year sentence.

The judge observed: 'There is plainly the risk of him reoffending, but the type of offence he may commit is not in my judgment of the most grave kind, though serious they undoubtedly are.'

Daq has been held in Bedford Prison following alleged incidents of aggressive and abusive behaviour, including attacks on other inmates, in immigration detention centres.

Amanda Weston, appearing for Daq, said he was suffering from depression and self-harming because of his lengthy detention, and that three years in custody for the purpose of deporting was 'beyond the outer limits' allowed by the law.

She said his offending was linked to his drug and alcohol addiction, but he was no longer addicted and no longer posed a threat.

He now had a young son, currently being looked after by an aunt, who had become a strong incentive for him to stay off drugs.

The 2001 census suggested there were 43,000 Somalis in the UK, but experts suggest the figure is at least 95,000 and possibly 250,000.