Lawangeen Abdulrahimzai, 21, an Afghan convicted this week of murdering a man in Bournemouth last year, had previously murdered two men in Serbia. He had also been caught drug-dealing in Italy. He had been allowed to stay in the UK despite doubts about his claim to be 14 years old (he was then 18) and was placed with a foster carer and enrolled in a secondary school. When his foster carer caught him carrying a knife, a social worker was sent to his home to give him a talk about the dangers of knives.

The case of Abdulrahimzai shows just how easy it is to outwit our authorities. It tells the world that Britain no longer has the will to guard its borders and that encourages more dangerous criminals to take advantage of the system. For this reason, it appears very much as if Britain is doomed to follow Sweden, whose fatal naivety and ineffective asylum policy led to crisis five years ago.

In Sweden, dangerous, grown men were put in children’s accommodation after claiming to be school age. The public, not as easily fooled as the authorities, began to protest. These protests became violent and Sweden’s asylum centres are now subject to arson attacks. Asylum claimants disappeared into the Swedish underworld. Gangland warfare intensified and police lost control.

It should be no surprise then that attacks on asylum centres are beginning to take place here and no surprise that public support for asylum is beginning to collapse, as it has done in Sweden.

Abdulrahimzai is far from alone in hoodwinking the system by pretending to be a child. Ahmed Hassan, jailed for 34 years in 2018 for the Parsons Green Tube bombing, had falsely claimed to be 16. He, too, was placed with unsuspecting foster parents. Between January 2018 and September 2022, 17,600 asylum applications were made by people claiming to be unaccompanied minors. Of these, 2,740 were later judged to be adults.

Many of these false claimants were suspected of being adults when they arrived, yet under Home Office rules they have to be treated as children unless two officers separately come to the conclusion that they are at least 18 years of age. It is no wonder that Britain has acquired a reputation for being an easy country to fool. Abdulrahimzai, it turned out, had already been rejected for asylum in Norway, despite its enthusiasm for human rights.

The tragedy of cases like these, and of similar unforgivable failures in the system, is that it makes it very much more difficult to help genuine child refugees. Ultimately, the asylum system relies on public support. It requires people to volunteer as hosts and foster parents, and depends on the goodwill of the community.

The British people are willing to help those in need. We saw this following the invasion of Ukraine, when people opened their doors to women and children fleeing bombed cities. But cases like Abdulrahimzai and Hassan undermine that goodwill.

The problems with Britain’s asylum system are threefold. First, we accept far too many applications from migrants who are travelling from safe countries. There were more than 45,000 arrivals in small boats from across the Channel last year alone. Under the Dublin Regulation, their claims should not be heard in Britain but in the first safe country in which they arrived. There is a very good reason for this – it acts as a deterrent for economic migrants who are trying to shop around for the country where they would most like to settle. It is to protect faith in the system and the interest of legitimate asylum seekers.

Next, it is taking far too long to process asylum applications. This is partly a function of the first problem: there were 145,000 claimants at the last count, 23,100 of them from the EU accession state of Albania. While they wait, these claimants are accommodated at the taxpayer’s expense. This has a detrimental effect on legitimate applicants (two-third of claims are accepted) and it also encourages criminality.

The final problem is that when applications have been rejected, deportation seldom follows. After Emad Al Swealmeen blew himself up in a failed attack on Liverpool Women’s Hospital on Remembrance Sunday in 2021, it was discovered that he had twice had asylum applications rejected under different names, but despite this he had not been deported.

Britain is not inundated with asylum seekers. The number arriving is well below its peak of 20 years ago and significantly below the European average – it is a third of the number who arrive in Germany and Spain. The trouble is that we have lost control of the asylum process. Unless Rishi Sunak can regain it, as he has promised, we run the risk of following in Sweden’s footsteps.