The suspected Liverpool bomber sought help from his local MP as he tried to secure leave to remain in the UK from the Home office, the Guardian understands.
Emad al-Swealmeen, also known as Enzo Almeni, contacted the office of Paula Barker, the Labour MP for Wavertree, last year. The Home Office is thought to have rejected his latest claim of asylum in December 2020.
Police believe Swealmeen ordered a taxi to Liverpool women’s hospital armed with a homemade bomb on Sunday. It exploded as the cab pulled up outside, killing Swealmeen, 32, and injuring the driver.
The disclosure that he had recently approached an MP for help with a Home Office application follows claims of an “unresolved grievance” over his immigration status.
Swealmeen is believed to have arrived in the UK about seven years ago from Jordan. Some documents claimed he was Syrian.
He converted from Islam to Christianity. He was baptised in 2015 and confirmed in Liverpool’s Anglican cathedral two years later. Through the cathedral he met Elizabeth and Malcolm Hitchcott, whom he moved in with for eight months from April 2017.
Malcolm Hitchcott, who served in the British army for 25 years, said Swealmeen had been involved in an incident that “involved a bridge and a knife” after his original asylum appeal was rejected.
“When his original asylum appeal was rejected, he had some mental problems. Now he was in fact sectioned, and he went away for six months to rehabilitation,” he told BBC Radio Merseyside. He described him as calm, measured and a genuine Christian. “What went wrong, I do not know,” Hitchcott added. A cathedral spokesperson said Swealmeen lost contact with its community in 2018.
Barker’s office confirmed that Swealmeen, whose Sutcliffe Road address falls within her Wavertree constituency, got in touch by email and it contacted the Home Office to enquire about his case.
The MP’s office said the limited correspondence did not flag any concerns about national security and that it had shared information with counter-terrorism officers investigating Sunday’s bombing.
It is understood the Sutcliffe Road address in the Kensington area of the city, where Swealmeen had been living alongside at least three others, is owned by a private landlord and managed by Serco, which was awarded the contract for housing asylum seekers in the north-west by the government in 2019.
Police believe he had recently rented another address in Rutland Avenue in the Sefton Park area of the city, where police seized “significant items” relating to the homemade bomb.
MPs can receive dozens of queries a month regarding asylum and immigration queries and can generally only act as a conduit of information between the constituent and the Home Office. It is understood that Swealmeen had continued to pursue a claim after the rejection.
So far, officials have found no known links to terrorist organisations but sources emphasised that these were “early days” and MI5 and the police were continuing to examine Swealmeen’s past.
A spokesperson for Paula Barker said: “As an office we had some limited interaction via email with Emad al-Swealmeen in respect to his asylum case with the Home Office. We were not aware that any security concerns existed in regards to this individual. We are not commenting further given this is an ongoing criminal investigation. We are actively continuing to cooperate with agencies like the police and the counter-terrorism unit in assisting with their operations. Further inquiries will have to be directed to the Home Office going forward.”