Police hunt ‘large number’ of Romanian supercrooks who slipped into Britain after massive delay in obtaining their criminal records
Home Secretary Theresa May, pictured, previously ordered background checks for all foreign suspects
- Police searching for hundreds of ‘serious criminals’ from Romania
- UK detectives have inundated country with background check requests
- But Eastern European nation ‘unable to cope’ with the demands
- Pilot project Operation Radar launched in Essex and Kent to ‘lock down’ foreign criminals’ identities from the moment they are arrested
A convicted Romanian killer raped a woman stranded at a railway station within a year of arriving in Britain undetected.
Ciprian Stanescu, 41, had been jailed for 12 years for a revenge killing in his home country.
In May 2014 he was allowed into the UK and the following January he raped a woman who had missed her last train from London’s Victoria Station, after luring her to his home.
He admitted rape and was jailed for eight years last September.
Police and immigration officers are searching for hundreds of ‘very serious’ foreign criminals in Britain after massive delays in obtaining their conviction records from Romania.
UK detectives inundated authorities in the Eastern European country with requests for background intelligence on suspects but, lacking the money and the computers to get through them all, the Romanians were unable to cope.
The huge backlog of cases has now been cleared thanks to the work of Britain’s criminal records exchange team – but it revealed just how dangerous are a number of Romanians now living in this country.
Their details have been passed to local forces and the Home Office’s immigration teams to see if the criminals can be kicked out of the country.
Details of the operation were revealed at a meeting of Acro, the police body responsible for sharing criminal records worldwide, and were obtained by The Mail on Sunday.
At a summit last July, those present were told: ‘As a result of internal problems with the Romanian Central Authority, a backlog of requests began to build up in the UK.
