UK authorities have launched a manhunt for a Nigerian-British citizen, Ifedayo Adeyeye, after he was wrongly released from prison despite an order extending his sentence by 12 months.
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Adeyeye had earlier been jailed for contempt of court after violating orders of the High Court of England and Wales directing him to facilitate the return of his four-year-old son, Laurys, who was allegedly taken from France to Nigeria without the consent of his mother, Claire N’Djosse.
According to court documents, Adeyeye was released in April after completing a six-month sentence at HMP Pentonville. However, the High Court had already extended his sentence by another 12 months after finding him in further breach of its return order.
The extension was reportedly not communicated to the prison authorities in time before his release on April 21. As a result, he has now been declared “unlawfully at large,” prompting efforts by the police to locate and rearrest him.
The case was described by the presiding judge, Justice Hayden, as “highly unusual” and deeply traumatic for the child, who is now said to be in Nigeria without either of his parents.
According to the court, Laurys had lived in France with his mother since his birth in 2021 and spoke French as his language. The judge said the child now finds himself in an unfamiliar country, separated from his mother, home, friends and the world he knew.
“He finds himself in an alien country now, without his father or mother, and in a culture that will be strange to him. His language was French, which is now not spoken around him,” the judge said.
Justice Hayden also noted that the child’s mother had been left devastated by Adeyeye’s release from custody, as his detention appeared to be one of the few available means of compelling compliance with the court’s orders.
“It is plainly causing his mother great anxiety and distress,” he added.
The dispute followed a short-lived relationship between Adeyeye and N’Djosse, who met in Grenoble, France, in 2020. Their relationship ended after about eight months, by which time Laurys had already been conceived.
The child was born in April 2021. His mother initially registered her new partner as the child’s biological father. She later alleged that this was because of sexual and physical violence she said Adeyeye had subjected her to during their relationship.
Adeyeye, however, suspected he was the child’s father and approached a court in Grenoble in June 2021 for a DNA test. The test confirmed him as Laurys’ biological father, after which he was granted parental responsibility.
In October 2023, the French court awarded sole custody of the child to N’Djosse but granted Adeyeye a progressive contact arrangement. The arrangement began with supervised visits at a contact centre and was later expanded to overnight stays.
However, the court records showed that the contact centre had raised concerns about Adeyeye’s behaviour during the supervised visits. He was described as arrogant, dismissive, rude and aggressive toward staff, and unwilling to engage meaningfully with the mother.
The centre also reportedly assessed him as showing little interest in the child’s routine, habits or life at his mother’s home.
Justice Hayden later said that, in hindsight, Adeyeye’s lack of interest in the child’s routine appeared significant because he allegedly used the first overnight stay as an opportunity to remove the child.
Before the incident, N’Djosse had reportedly asked the French court for a prohibited steps order to stop Laurys from being taken out of France, but the application was refused because of how and when it was presented.
In July 2024, Adeyeye took Laurys for what was meant to be an approved overnight visit. When the scheduled return time elapsed, he failed to return the child to his mother.
He later claimed the child had been taken on a two-week holiday with his family, but did not disclose where the child had been taken. Even after the supposed holiday period ended, Laurys was not returned.
Investigations later revealed that Adeyeye had taken the boy from France to England and then onward to Nigeria.
French authorities subsequently issued an international arrest warrant against Adeyeye over alleged child abduction and unlawful retention of a minor.
Further inquiries also revealed that Adeyeye had provided a fake address to the French court and had obtained both a British passport and a Nigerian passport for Laurys without the mother’s knowledge.
In Nigeria, he allegedly obtained guardianship orders in favour of relatives by falsely claiming that both parents had consented to the arrangement. The UK court noted that the mother was never notified and did not participate in the Nigerian proceedings.
Justice Hayden said the impact on the child had been severe, describing the mother’s pain as unbearable to watch.
“This is a child who had never spent a night away from her before and whom she has not seen since. Her pain is visceral and unbearable to watch,” he said.
The judge added that Laurys must have been terrified after being removed from everything familiar to him.
“Laurys must have been terrified, missing his home, his mother, his friends, his entire world. It was snatched away from him by his own father, whom he ought to have been able to look to for protection, but who became, instead, a dangerous threat to his son’s physical and emotional welfare,” he said.
Adeyeye was arrested in London in December 2024 after N’Djosse approached the High Court of England and Wales seeking orders to locate and return the child.
At first, she believed Laurys might be in England, but it later emerged that he had been taken to Nigeria.
The case raised difficult jurisdictional issues because the child was no longer physically present in England or France. The court also noted that Nigeria is not a signatory to the 1980 Hague Convention on International Child Abduction, making the process of securing the child’s return more complicated.
Despite this, the High Court held that it could rely on its inherent jurisdiction because Laurys is a British citizen. Justice Hayden described the situation as exceptional, noting that the case involved three countries: France, England and Nigeria.
The court found that the Nigerian court had been deliberately misled into making guardianship orders and held that the unusual facts justified the use of its powers to secure the child’s return.
In May 2025, after the High Court ruled that it had jurisdiction to act, Adeyeye sought to appeal the decision, but the Court of Appeal refused permission.
Laurys was later made a ward of court, and a summary return order was issued directing that he be returned to France, where he had been habitually resident with his mother. The judge held that returning him through London would be unnecessarily burdensome.
Adeyeye’s continued refusal to comply with the court’s orders led to contempt proceedings, resulting in his initial six-month sentence and the later 12-month sentence.
In the latest ruling, Justice Hayden ordered that photographs of Adeyeye and Laurys be made public to assist efforts to locate the father and support enforcement of the court’s orders.
Although family court cases are usually anonymised to protect children, the judge ruled that the circumstances justified naming the parties and publishing their images. He also said there was a wider public interest in transparency, especially where failures by state agencies may have affected efforts to enforce court orders.
The court also approved disclosure orders to assist investigations into Adeyeye’s whereabouts.
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