Liverpool bomber Emad Al Swealmeen's asylum claim rejected by court six years before hospital attack

Report by Amy Welch

The Liverpool bomber's asylum claim was dismissed more than six years before he tried to carry out the attack, newly obtained court documents confirm.

Emad Al Swealmeen died in the blast and subsequent fire after his homemade bomb detonated in a taxi outside Liverpool Women's Hospital shortly before 11am on November 14.

His inquest revealed he bought 2,000 ball bearings and rented a "bomb-making factory" to manufacture a device with "murderous intent".

The Iraqi-born 32-year-old falsely claimed to be of Syrian heritage in asylum applications.

He came to the UK in May 2014 legally, with a Jordanian passport and UK visa but his asylum claim was rejected, a coroner's court heard last month.

He challenged the Home Office decision by lodging an appeal with the First-tier Tribunal (Immigration and Asylum Chamber) but this was dismissed in 2015.

The decision dated April 16 of that year, after a hearing in Manchester three days earlier, detailed how Al Swealmeen had been diagnosed with depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder.

Home Office officials decided he had not established a "well-founded fear of persecution so that he did not qualify for asylum" and had not demonstrated "substantial grounds" to qualify for humanitarian protection. He had been informed of the "decision to remove him from the United Kingdom", the court papers said.

The judge noted there were "a number of problems" with his evidence and, considering Al Swealmeen's credibility, said: "I find that the appellant has attempted to give an account to put himself in the best light ...

"In view of all the evidence, I reject his account of events in Syria and his fears on his return in their entirety, and dismiss his asylum appeal."

Al Swealmeen did not attend the hearing. The solicitors initially representing him had withdrawn from the case and asked to be removed from the record.

Born in Baghdad, he had been in prison in the Middle East for a serious assault, as well as being convicted previously in Liverpool of possession of an offensive weapon. Al Swealmeen was still a practising Muslim despite converting to Christianity once in the UK, the coroner's court was told.

Christian couple Elizabeth and Malcolm Hitchcott, took Al Swealmeen into their home in Liverpool in 2017.

In an exclusive interview with ITV News, Mrs Hitchcott described the attack as a "waste of a life", but was glad that no-one else was killed in the blast.

"What a waste of a life. But the one thing I suppose to be thankful for is that he did not kill anyone else," she told ITV News.

The couple described Al Swealmeen as an “artistic” individual who had taken a cake decorating course and was obsessed with motor racing.

He then lived at Home Office-provided accommodation in Sutcliffe Street, in the Kensington area of Liverpool, but since April had rented a self-contained flat in Rutland Avenue, the inquest heard.

Officials confirmed that in January last year Al Swealmeen launched another first-tier tribunal appeal which was still outstanding at the time of the attack, suggesting he had recently submitted a fresh asylum claim to the Home Office which had also been rejected.

The department has repeatedly refused to answer questions about the case or explain why Al Swealmeen was not removed from the UK once his asylum claim, and subsequent appeal, was rejected.

When contacted by the PA News Agency, the Home Office said it was "fixing the broken asylum system" and that the "New Plan for Immigration will require people to raise all protection-related issues up front to tackle the practice of making multiple and sequential claims and enable the removal of those with no right to be in our country more quickly".

A spokesman would not comment on whether the Home Office was conducting carrying out an internal inquiry, or conducting any investigations, into how the case was handled.

Decisions made by the First-tier Tribunal (Immigration and Asylum Chamber) are not ordinarily reported.

However, after requests for the records were made by the press, the tribunal's president Judge Michael Clements accepted that in this instance the "public interest element is such that this outweighs the usual practice".