The British-Nigerian had been jailed in the UK for the act but is expected to spend more time in jail.
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.
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.
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.
