UK launches manhunt for Nigerian who ‘abducted’ son from France

The UK authorities have launched a manhunt for a Nigerian who was jailed after abducting his son from France to Nigeria, but was wrongly released from prison.

The hunt followed a ruling by the High Court of England and Wales to extend the sentence of Ifedayo Adeyeye by 12 months, a decision that officials at HMP Pentonville prison, where he was held, said was not communicated in time, court documents obtained by PREMIUM TIMES showed.

Mr Adeyeye is a Nigerian-British citizen who was released in April after completing a six-month sentence for contempt of court.

The contempt was for violating the UK High Court’s Return Order and multiple judicial directives intended to facilitate the return of his son, Laurys.

According to the court documents, Mr Adeyeye had abducted his four-year-old son in July 2024, during what was supposed to be their first overnight stay together during the implementation of a “progressive visit arrangement” ordered by a French Court the previous year.

Mr Adeyeye took Laurys from France, where he and his mother, Claire N’Djosse, a Cameroonian, had lived since his birth in 2021, to England and then to Nigeria without the consent of his mother, his primary caregiver.

When the scheduled time for the sleepover elapsed, and it was time to return the child to his mother, Mr Adeyeye claimed that the four-year-old had been taken on a two-week holiday with his family.

He did not indicate where the boy had gone for the two-week holiday. He did not return the child after the “two-week holiday” expired, prompting an investigation that eventually revealed he had taken the child to Nigeria.

The court documents reviewed by this paper showed that Mr Adeyeye left the child in the care of relatives and returned to the United Kingdom, where he was arrested months later.

He was then sentenced to six months in prison for breach of the Return Order after doing “absolutely nothing” to comply. While in custody, he was also found in further breach of the Return Order in April 2026 and sentenced to an additional 12 months.

But notice of this was not communicated to the prison until the eve of his release, and “was not flagged before his release on the morning of 21 April for the 6 months sentence” he was held on.

As such, he was declared “unlawfully at large”, prompting a police manhunt to locate and rearrest him.

The judge presiding over the case, Justice Hayden, described the case as “highly unusual” and traumatic for 4-year-old Laurys, abandoned in Nigeria.

“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.

He also said that Ms N’Djosse was devastated by Mr Adeyeye’s release from custody, as it seemed to be her only hope of ever reuniting with her son.

“It is plainly causing his mother great anxiety and distress,” he said.

The controversy surrounding Laury’s birth

Mr Adeyeye and Ms N’Djosse met in 2020 in Grenoble, France, and began a short-lived romantic relationship that ended eight months later. At this time, however, Laury had already been conceived.

The child was born in April 2021. His mother registered her new partner, whose name was not identified in the court papers, as the biological father. The rationale for this, as she would later allege, was the sexual and physical violence Mr Adeyeye had subjected her to during their relationship.

However, Mr Adeyeye suspected what had happened and applied to the court in Grenoble in June 2021 for a DNA test. The court is identified in the document as “the French court.”

The test confirmed Mr Adeyeye as the biological father, and he was subsequently granted parental responsibility.

Two years later, the French court granted him a “progressive contact plan” while full custody of the child remained with Ms N’Djosse.

“This plan began with supervised visits at a contact centre and was gradually increased to overnight stays.”

Implementation of the court order, however, brought trouble in its wake. It directly led to the bringing of the child to Nigeria, and a legal battle that has lasted longer than the eight-month relationship of the estranged lovers.

One of the first issues that arose was Mr Adeyeye’s unwillingness to cooperate with the centre assigned to supervise the visits.

“In October 2023, the French court awarded the mother sole custody of Laurys and ordered that Adeyeye should have progressively increasing contact, beginning with supervised contact.

“Contact commenced in January 2024 and was supervised at a French contact centre.

“Records from the centre documented ongoing difficulties with Adeyeye’s cooperation and behaviour. Despite these difficulties, contact continued. The father was arrogant, dismissive, and rude to the contact staff.

“He was recorded as aggressive with the team and entirely unprepared to engage with the mother,” the judge said.

The contact centre also assessed him as “not interested in his son’s routine or in his habits or the life he could lead at his mother’s house.”

The judge, Mr Hayden, said in hindsight, the father’s uninterest in his son’s routines during the visits was a clear sign that he planned to use their first night together to abduct him.

“In particular, his refusal to consider what are referred to as his son’s habits and special needs’ prior to the overnight contact has even greater resonance now that it has become clear that he was intending to utilise that first overnight stay to abduct his son,” he said.

According to the court documents, Ms N’Djosse had also suspected and requested a “Prohibited Steps Order” from the French court to prevent Laurys from being taken out of France.

However, the application was denied because it was not submitted in writing beforehand and was made orally late in the day.

The child’s illegal transfer

The visits continued. The French court orders were consistently upheld for seven months, from January to July 2024.

This was until that “overnight stay” in which Mr Adeyeye took Laurys for an approved visit.

After Mr Adeyeye failed to return the child to his mother following the visit, and after the two-week holiday period he had promised had elapsed, the French government issued an international arrest warrant for him on charges related to child abduction and unlawful retention of a minor.

French law enforcement also began an investigation into the matter and found that Mr Adeyeye had provided a fake address to the French Court.

“Further investigation established that Adeyeye had taken Laurys from France to England and then onward to Nigeria. It also emerged that Adeyeye had obtained both a British passport and a Nigerian passport for Laurys without the mother’s knowledge.”

In Nigeria, Mr Adeyeye also obtained “guardianship orders from the Nigerian Court in favour of a Nigerian family said to be Adeyeye’s relatives.”

He did this by falsely claiming that both parents consented to the arrangement.

But the judge, Mr Hayden, reiterated that the mother was not notified and never participated in the court proceedings in Nigeria.

The situation has had a perilous impact on the child, the judge declared, according to the document reviewed.

“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.

“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.

Mr Adeyeye was arrested in London in December 2024.

The court’s ruling

Ms N’Djosse went to the High Court of England and Wales in the same month seeking a “Location Order and Orders” for the return of Laurys, initially believing he might be in England. But this effort did not produce the desired result as the child was no longer in England.

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The judge, in his account of the case as set out in the documents, stated that the situation raised concerns about the court’s jurisdiction to act where the child was physically present in neither England nor France.

The judge also observed that Nigeria is not a signatory to the 1980 Hague Convention on International Child Abduction, complicating attempts to secure the child’s return through treaty mechanisms.

The court, however, ruled that it could invoke its “inherent jurisdiction” based on the child’s British nationality to order measures aimed at securing his return—a route considered entirely unusual.

The court acknowledged that such powers are rarely used. It said no previous reported case had applied the jurisdiction in similar circumstances involving a child outside both the UK and the country of habitual residence.

“What distinguishes this case from the others considered is that, unusually, there are three countries involved. That is not a feature of any of the cases that I have been referred to,” the judge said.

“Against this factual backdrop, the risk of cutting across statutory schemes needs to be considered in the context of a third jurisdiction (Nigeria), in which the Nigerian Court has itself plainly been deliberately and dishonestly deceived into making invalid Orders.

“The dangers involved in cutting across the scheme adhered to by two signatories to the Hague Convention recede when the child is in neither jurisdiction. To my mind, it is the reciprocity of international comity that needs to be emphasised here.”

In May 2025, following the hearing during which Justice Hayden determined that the High Court had the “exceptional” jurisdiction to put in place measures to secure the child’s return, Mr Adeyeye appealed the ruling. Still, the Court of Appeal refused permission to appeal.

Even though this specific jurisdiction had never been successfully invoked in such a context before, the Court of Appeal considered that the Order was correct given the “exceptional” circumstances of the case.

Following this refusal, Laurys was made a ward of court, and a summary Return Order was issued.

The judge ordered that Laurys be returned directly to France—his country of residence—rather than to England, as the court determined that a detour to London would be “needlessly burdensome” for the child.

Mr Adeyeye’s refusal to facilitate the return of the child led to contempt of court charges, resulting in his sentencing last December and again in April 2026.

In his latest ruling, the judge ordered that images of the father and child be publicised to help locate Mr Adeyeye and support enforcement efforts.

Although family court proceedings are usually anonymised to protect children, the judge ruled that the circumstances justified naming the parties and permitting the publication of images of both the father and the child. He also said there was a broader public interest in transparency, and that state failures may have undermined efforts to secure compliance with court orders.

The judge additionally approved disclosure orders intended to assist investigations into Mr Adeyeye’s whereabouts.