In the early hours of the morning Kevin Ford, an immigrant from Jamaica, parked his car alongside a red Rover near a nightclub in Spital Hill, Sheffield, and pulled out a revolver.

One bullet shattered the Rover’s windscreen. Another ricocheted into the darkness. A third hit one of the car’s occupants, a man called Alton Chambers, seriously wounding him.

“Now go and inform,” crowed Ford, who had apparently suspected Chambers of grassing on him. As he sped off that night in June 2004, Ford left Chambers haemorrhaging blood in the road; his victim was saved only by emergency surgery and lost a third of his liver.

Within days detectives had traced Ford to London where he was arrested by armed police. That success, though, was tempered by a shocking discovery: Ford should not have been in the country at all.

Not only was he wanted for rape and murder in Jamaica, but he had also been previously imprisoned for a sex attack in Britain. Yet he had not been deported on his release — and nobody seemed to know why.

One officer in the South Yorkshire police recalled last week: “We sent Ford’s fingerprints to Jamaica and established that he was wanted for the rape and murder of a 15-year-old girl with learning difficulties in Kingston.

“He had then come to Britain, committed a sex attack in this country and been imprisoned. He was an illegal immigrant, so clearly he should have been reviewed for deportation when he was in prison. Instead, they let him out. We never got to the bottom of why.

“He was released and then tried to kill someone. We had to arrest him at some cost, then there was a trial with even further costs and now he is serving a sentence of up to 30 years with the taxpayers having to pay again.”

Like the rest of the estimated 10,000 to 12,000 foreign criminals in Britain’s jails, Ford is costing taxpayers about £38,000 a year.

However, the most galling question is: how could the authorities have failed to deport such a murderous psychopath in the first place? Last week Charles Clarke, the home secretary, revealed that 1,023 foreign criminals had been released from Britain’s prisons between 1999 and 2006 without any consideration being given to their deportation as the law now requires. Among them were murderers, rapists, violent assailants and burglars.

On Friday Clarke was forced to admit that an as yet uncertain but frightening number had gone on to commit further serious crimes.

Of a sample of 79 of the most serious offenders whose cases had been reviewed by the Home Office, five (6%) were guilty of further offences relating to “drugs, violent disorder, grievous and actual bodily harm”.

One of those had also been involved in a suspected rape but was not prosecuted because of insufficient evidence. Two other allegations of sexual offences relating to the initial 79 are still under investigation.

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