Life for girl's killer

The scandal of how an illegal immigrant was allowed to kill a schoolgirl in her own home emerged today.

Andrezej Kunowski, who has a history of sex crimes, was jailed for life for strangling 12-year-old Katerina Koneva. He killed her after she arrived home from school in Hammersmith. As the 48-year-old Pole was sentenced at the Old Bailey, astonishing details of his life emerged:

Today Katerina's mother said she could not believe that he had been allowed into Britain despite having a string of sex crime convictions. It emerged today he had begun his sex crimes as a teenager and had been jailed for 15 years in his native Poland for 27 serious attacks on women and girls aged between 12 and 20.

He had jumped bail in Poland in 1995 after raping a 10-year-old in her home in Warsaw and after an attack on another 11-year-old girl.

Kunowski arrived in Britain in 1996 on a Polish visitor's visa. He claimed asylum but was again allowed to leave, this time from an asylum detention centre in Oxford, and disappeared before his application could be rejected.

By simply sending immigration officials a letter with a Polish postmark he convinced them he had returned home and no further checks were made.

The truth was, as Nicholas Hilliard, prosecuting, told the court: "He was still in this country and able to rape a girl later that month."

It was only after this rape of a 21-year-old Korean student in Acton in September 2002 that police were able to match him to the DNA and fingerprints he had left at the scene of Katerina's murder five years earlier and piece together his Polish past.

Jailing Kunowski for life the Common Serjeant of London Judge Peter Beaumont said: "I would be failing in my duty in light of the evidence in this case if you didn't spend the rest of your life in prison, and that's the order I make."

Outside court Detective Chief Inspector David Little said: "He is the most dangerous sex offender I have ever come across, certainly the most prolific."

Now Scotland Yard detectives will be questioning him about a series of missing women, in particular about two who disappeared in west London - Elizabeth Chau and Lola Shenkoya.

Miss Chau, a 19-year-old student, disappeared in April 1999 as she walked to her home in Ealing.

Miss Shenkoya, a 27-year-old US citizen of Nigerian origin, vanished in the same area. She has not been seen since she took a bus to Ealing Broadway in January 2000.