The footage shows Hadush Kebatu in Dalston CLR James Library at around 6pm yesterday (October 25).
The Ethiopian national – who was due to be deported – was caught by police in Finsbury Park at around 8.30am today.
In the video, Kebatu is still wearing his prison-issue grey tracksuit top and bottoms and carrying his belongings in a white bag with pictures of avocados on it.
Kebatu was jailed for 12 months in September for the sexual assault of a 14-year-old girl and was wrongly freed from HMP Chelmsford on Friday morning instead of being sent to an immigration detention centre.
The migrant, who had been living at the Bell Hotel in Epping, Essex, when he assaulted the girl, took a train from Chelmsford to Stratford, east London.
He was said to have taken multiple train journeys around London while asking members of the public for directions.
Sir Keir Starmer said Kebatu will be deported.
“Officers have worked quickly and diligently to bring him back into custody,” the Prime Minister added.
“We have ordered an investigation to establish what went wrong. We must make sure this doesn’t happen again.”
A delivery driver described seeing Kebatu return to HMP Chelmsford in a “very confused” state “four or five times”, only to be turned away by prison staff and directed to the railway station.
The driver, named only as Sim, told Sky News he saw Kebatu come out of the prison saying: “Where am I going? What am I doing?”
He said Kebatu knew he should be deported but the prison staff were “basically sending him away” and saying to him, “Go, you’ve been released, you go”.
In the 12 months to March this year, 262 prisoners were released in error in England and Wales, according to the prison service’s annual digest – that was a 128% increase from 115 the previous year, with 233 involving prisons.
