[Jimbuna]

Baptisms 'a ticket to something' for some asylum seekers - vicar

Some asylum seekers see baptisms "as a ticket to something" and most baptism requests were when they were appealing an asylum claim, a vicar has told MPs.

Rev Matthew Firth told the Home Affairs select committee he was brought groups of asylum seekers looking to convert.

MPs were hearing evidence after it was claimed Clapham attacker Abdul Shokoor Ezedi got asylum on the grounds of his conversion to Christianity.

The Bishop of Chelmsford told MPs she queried Rev Firth's claims.

"The figures don't quite add up to me," the Right Reverend Guli Francis-Dehqani said.

She added: "I have spoken to clergy who have turned people down [for baptism] because they did not feel they met the criteria."

The clergy took baptisms very seriously, she said.

Rev Firth, who was a priest at St Cuthbert's church in Darlington, left the Church of England in 2020, and is now a vicar for the Free Church of England.

He previously wrote in the Telegraph that there was a "conveyor belt" system of baptisms of asylum seekers hoping to obtain leave to remain in the UK on religious grounds.

He told MPs that when he came to St Cuthbert's in 2018 he found there was a "surprising number" of asylum seekers being baptised.

He honoured the ones that were already in process but then "started to look into it a bit further".

He said: "After those baptisms, week-in, week-out, significant groups of mainly Iranian and Syrian young male asylum seekers were being brought to me in sizeable cohorts."

Rev Firth told MPs that cohorts of "six or seven" people were brought to him "every two or three weeks".

Asked who brought the asylum seekers to him, Rev Firth said: "There was a particular individual who I think had received right to remain in the UK through the asylum application system."

"This particular individual", he added, "was bringing lots of people who [he] said needed to be baptised".

The Diocese of Durham has strongly rejected Rev Firth's claims.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-68543879