30 S.l.a.s.h.e.s. Two Police Stops. One Woman Walking Home. How a Mentally Ill Asylum Seeker Was Still Free
On a busy Headingley street at about 9 p.m. on 17 March 2024, a 32-year-old woman was walking home after dinner when a stranger seized her from behind. Ibrahim Albashir locked her in a stranglehold and drove a broken bottle into her chest and neck again and again. Witnesses later said the assault looked frenzied. Court evidence put the number of thrusts as high as thirty. The attack stopped only when door staff and bystanders from The Original Oak pub on Otley Road knocked him unconscious.
Albashir, 34, is a Sudanese national diagnosed with catatonic schizophrenia. He left Sudan at 25, travelled through Libya and Italy, and spent six months in a French psychiatric hospital. France refused him asylum. He then paid people smugglers to cross from Calais. By early 2024 he was in Home Office-linked accommodation in Birmingham and had also stayed in Luton, Coventry and Barrow-in-Furness.
While in Birmingham he sexually assaulted a hostel worker after she rejected a sexual approach. West Midlands Police received a complaint. He was arrested a week later in Norfolk, bailed, and the case was later shelved for lack of evidence. That record did not appear as an active “wanted” marker when other forces later checked the Police National Computer.
He reached Leeds after being removed from a Manchester-to-York train for travelling without a ticket. On 14 March 2024, British Transport Police arrested him at Leeds station on suspicion of immigration offences. West Yorkshire Police took him into custody, then released him: his asylum claim was still live, so officers concluded no immigration offence had been completed. The following day police were called about a man exposing himself. Officers treated it as a mental-health episode and took him to hospital. Two days later he was waiting near the pub.
He pleaded guilty to attempted murder on the first day of a planned trial. On 25 August 2026, Judge Robin Mairs at Leeds Crown Court imposed a 25-year prison term plus an indefinite hospital order so treatment can continue. The judge said mental illness was not the sole cause and that the assault had a sexual element.
The victim told the court her physical wounds were not the deepest injury. She lives with anxiety, dreads walking past the same stretch of road, and says every question about her scar forces her to relive the night. Police later praised the pub security team whose intervention almost certainly prevented a killing.
The case has drawn political fire because several agencies touched Albashir and still left him on the street: French refusal of asylum, Channel crossing, a sexual-assault complaint that did not stay live on national systems, two Leeds police contacts in three days, and a hospital assessment that did not result in detention. Shadow ministers argued a man with this history should never have been free in Britain. The Home Office said it would not comment on his entry route and pointed to planned changes to human rights law intended to speed deportations of foreign offenders.
The sequence is now a public test of whether immigration control, police intelligence and mental-health powers can work together before the next stranger is attacked on an ordinary street.
