Search for Clapham chemical attack suspect Abdul Ezedi enters third day | London

The search for the suspected chemical attacker Abdul Ezedi has entered its third day as police renewed calls for the 35-year-old to hand himself in.

Ezedi, from the Newcastle area, has been on the run since Wednesday’s attack and is described as having very “significant injuries to the right side of his face”.

A “vulnerable” woman and her daughters were injured after a corrosive alkaline substance was thrown at them in Clapham, south London.

The 31-year-old mother, believed to be known to Ezedi, remained “very poorly” and sedated in hospital, with her injuries thought to be “life-changing”, police said.

The injuries to her daughters, aged three and eight, were “not likely to be life-changing”. The victims were taken to hospital along with passersby and police officers who were injured as they tried to help.

The Metropolitan police commander Jon Savell told reporters on Friday that “significant and important pieces of evidence” were recovered in searches carried out in east London and Newcastle on Thursday night.

Two empty containers labelled with corrosive warnings were found at an address in Newcastle, and tests were being carried out to check whether they held the substance used during the attack, PA Media reported.

Savell said: “In terms of our manhunt for Ezedi, we’ve got a large team of very experienced detectives leading the manhunt, using all the tactics that you would expect us to use, lots of officers out on the ground.

“We’re working very closely with colleagues from Transport for London, British Transport Police and our colleagues in Northumbria police as well.

“Last night, five search warrants were executed – two in east London and three up in Newcastle. We’ve recovered some significant and important pieces of evidence which will help with our investigation.”

Ezedi attempted to drive away from the scene, crashing into a stationary vehicle and then fleeing on foot, police said. He boarded a tube at Clapham South underground station and by 8pm he was at King’s Cross tube station.

At 8.42pm, Ezedi was captured on CCTV in a branch of Tesco on Caledonian Road, pictured with a “fairly significant facial injury”, where he bought a bottle of water. He then boarded a southbound Victoria line tube train at 9pm, the last confirmed sighting.

Savell said to Ezedi: “Abdul, you clearly have got some very significant injuries. We’ve seen the images. You need some medical help, so do the right thing and hand yourself in.”

Ezedi, reportedly from Afghanistan, was convicted in 2018 for sexual assault and exposure and granted refugee status in 2021 or 2022. He was believed by British government officials to be an Afghan national who arrived in a lorry in 2016.

His brother, Hassan, told the Sun he would hand the suspect in if he knew where he was and urged him to give himself up. “I don’t know if he’s alive or where he is now. I saw him briefly last week. He wasn’t living with me. He was in Newcastle,” he told the paper.

A number of Conservative MPs have since questioned how he was granted refugee status, despite two previous failed attempts and his criminal convictions. He is understood to have been allowed to stay in the UK after a priest confirmed he had converted to Christianity.

The Rt Rev Phillip North, the bishop of Blackburn, hit back against a suggestion by the former immigration minister Robert Jenrick that people making “spurious asylum claims” were being aided by “well-meaning but naive vicars and priests”.

North told BBC Radio 4’s PM programme on Friday: “In this diocese I’ve done quite a few confirmations, maybe 30 or 40, mostly of Iranian men who are seeking asylum. Preparation for that has been done in great depth by parish clergy, who have got to know those people well.

“You can’t look into someone’s soul, you can’t see what is going on at the very depths of their heart. But you can see they have become integrated with the church, they are practising their faith and have gone through a confirmation.”

He added: “The church is not the asylum authority, responsibility for asylum lies with government and this sounds to me like a pretty barefaced attempt to outsource responsibility for a failing asylum system to the church.”

The Diocese of Hexham and Newcastle said it had “found nothing” to suggest Ezedi had become a Catholic but checks were continuing.

It said: “We can confirm that Abdul Shakoor Ezedi visited our diocesan Justice and Peace Refugee Project, a charitable venture which assists a wide range of people who come to us in need.

“We are in the process of checking if this individual was received into the Catholic faith in any of our parishes, and have so far found nothing to support that. We are also investigating whether he was helped in other ways.

“The diocese will assist the police investigations in any way we can.”