Libby Squire’s killer agrees to meet her mother – as new footage shows him laughing during his arrest
The mother of murdered student Libby Squire has revealed that the “sexual predator” who raped and killed the 21-year-old has agreed to meet her.
Lisa Squire told Sky News she is determined to find out what exactly happened to her daughter after she was abducted by Pawel Relowicz – and hopes to get answers by speaking to him.
The Polish butcher was jailed for 27 years for raping and murdering Libby, who disappeared during a night out in Hull in January 2019. Her body was found seven weeks later in the Humber Estuary.
Relowicz, now 28, denied killing Libby and pathologists were unable to determine a cause of death because of the amount of time her body had been in the water.
Mrs Squire said she was in the process of arranging a meeting with Relowicz through a restorative justice charity, adding that it was “quite a brave thing” for him to do.
“A lot of people don’t understand this – I don’t hate him,” she told Sky News.
“I’m not angry with him. I just want information from him.
“I don’t wish to forgive him. I don’t wish to understand why he did what he did.
“For me, it’s very much about finding out how she was in those last 20 minutes of her life.”
Lisa Squire and her daughter Libby
Libby’s killer sets conditions for meeting
Mrs Squire said a date has not yet been set for the meeting and Relowicz has outlined certain conditions that are still to be resolved.
She said: “We’ve got to the stage where he’s agreed to see me but has changed some of the parameters.
“For me, it’s really important to find out how she died. I need to know that.
“Will I believe him if he tells me? I don’t know.
“There are lots of questions I want to ask.”
Mrs Squire said Relowicz, who was found guilty of Libby’s rape and murder following a trial last year, still denies the crimes.
On the conditions he has set for their meeting, she added: “As far as I’m aware, he doesn’t want to talk about what happened that night, which is the only reason I want to see him.
“We have to come up with some sort of arrangement, between him and I, as to what we’re going to talk about.
“It’s actually quite a brave thing for him to do. Prisoners don’t get any reward for seeing the victim’s family.
“To agree to see me in the first place is a big thing. And I am grateful.
“I certainly don’t want him as my best friend, but I don’t hate him.
“He holds the key to questions I have.”
Pawel Relowicz (R) appeared to laugh after being told of his arrest for Libby’s rape and murder. Pic: Libby, Are You Home Yet? Sky and Candour Productions
Fears Relowicz could kill again
Libby’s murder is explored in a new Sky Crime documentary – called Libby, Are You Home Yet? – which features previously unreleased footage of Relowicz laughing as he is told he is being arrested for Libby’s rape and murder.
The three-part programme considers whether Relowicz, a father of two who lived with his wife and children in Hull, could have been stopped earlier by police after he committed a string of offences – including voyeurism, outraging public decency and burglary – in the months before Libby was killed.
Relowicz had been carrying out a campaign of chilling, sexually motivated crimes in the student area of Hull – peering through windows to watch young women, breaking into their homes to steal intimate items, and masturbating in the street.
In the hours after raping and killing Libby, he returned home and watched pornography before going out again in an apparent search for another victim.
Mrs Squire – who describes Relowicz in the documentary as a “sexual predator” whose crimes were “stomach churning” – told Sky News she fears he will kill again if he is released at the end of his 27-year sentence.
“There is not a question of doubt in my mind that if he only gets to serve 27 years, he will come out and do it again, because he will only be in his early 50s,” she said.
Police uncovered drone footage Relowicz recorded of himself. Pic: Libby, Are You Home Yet? Sky and Candour Productions
“He shows no remorse now and I don’t believe in 20 years’ time he’ll show any remorse.
“He will come out and do it again. I’m absolutely convinced of it.
“For such a young man to do such horrendous things, even putting Libby’s rape and murder to one side, the things he was doing were just so abnormal for all men.
“He is an incredibly dangerous individual.
“Whilst I’ve got breath in my body, I will ensure that man never comes out of prison – ever.”
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Libby Squire’s mother: ‘Verdict changes nothing’
Libby’s killer ‘should have same sentence as Wayne Couzens’
Mrs Squire believes her daughter’s killer should have received a whole life prison sentence – like the one given to police officer Wayne Couzens, who abducted, raped and murdered Sarah Everard.
She has argued that whole life tariffs should be the automatic sentence for anyone convicted of murder, but says when she put this to Boris Johnson during a meeting earlier this year, the then prime minister told her: “There aren’t the prison spaces.”
In response to that, Mrs Squire said: “Well then build more prisons, it’s a simple as that.
“Anyone who goes out and takes a life should be given a whole life tariff, end of.
“In 27 years, Libby doesn’t come back. I don’t get my daughter back. My children don’t get to have their sister back.
“We have a whole life sentence to live.
“This was a choice. [Relowicz] chose to do this. I didn’t have any choice in this and yet it seems to me that we are punished more than they are.
“The Wayne Couzens and Relowicz sentences should be the same.”
‘If one of you had gone home with her, she would still be alive today’
In the documentary, friends of Libby, who were with her on the night she disappeared, reveal they were blamed by some people for not travelling home with her after she was refused entry to the club.
One friend, Amelia, says she was in a taxi when the driver turned around and said it was her fault that Libby had gone missing.
Mrs Squire told Sky News that only Relowicz was to blame for her daughter’s death but admitted she went through a phase where she thought: “Without question, if one of you had gone home with her, she would still be alive today.”
“That is the truth. There is no getting away from that fact,” Mrs Squire said.
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Libby Squire’s final moments
“But they didn’t do any of this deliberately. They didn’t know what was going to happen.
“Those poor people who were with her that night have got to live with this for the rest of their lives.
“They have a whole different life because of what that man did to our daughter.
“I never blamed them… there’s only one person to blame for Libby’s death.”
Mrs Squire says she now tells Libby’s three siblings when they go out: “Be aware of your surroundings, be aware of who you are, and never leave your mates – if you go out as a two, you come home as a two.”
Libby was strangled or asphyxiated, mother believes
On the night Libby was killed, Mrs Squire believes her daughter had gone for a walk to calm down because she was angry about being refused entry to the club.
She also believes Relowicz either persuaded her daughter to get into his car “under false pretences” or that he “put her” in the vehicle.
“I believe there’s only two possibilities of how she died – asphyxiation or strangulation,” she said.
“I would like to know because it’s a massive thing. It’s very hard to not know how your child has died.
“I would like for him to tell me but I don’t think he ever will.”
‘I miss her beyond belief’
Mrs Squire said her husband Russ declined to feature in the documentary as Libby’s death remains “incredibly raw for him” and he does not want to meet Relowicz.
“Not being able to see her and speak to her every day, it is torture,” Mrs Squire said of her daughter.
“It goes without saying I miss her beyond belief. I still get really tearful when I think about it.
“I’m incredibly proud of her. She’s making such a difference to people even now.
“I miss her. I miss her so much and it’s really hard. Some days I struggle to get out of bed to carry on a day without her.
“I know if I gave in and laid in bed, she would be saying: ‘For goodness’ sake, get up. You can’t be laying in bed all day’.
“Everything I do, I do to honour her and make my other children proud.”
Libby, Are You Home Yet? is available from 27 October on Sky Crime at 9pm and streaming service Now
Ramesh lives in fear every day. A police siren is enough to alarm him.
He’s one of up to 400,000 visa overstayers in the UK, one lawyer we spoke to believes.
It’s only an estimate because the Home Office has stopped collecting figures – which were unreliable in the first place.
Britain is being laughed at, one man told us, “because they know it’s a soft country”.
‘Ramesh’ came to the UK from India
We meet Ramesh (not his real name) at a Gurdwara, a Sikh place of worship, where he goes for food and support.
He insists he can’t return to India where he claims he was involved in political activism.
Ramesh says he came to the UK on a student visa in 2023, but it was cancelled when he failed to continue his studies after being involved in a serious accident.
He tells us he is doing cash-in-hand work for people who he knows through the community where he is living and is currently working on a house extension where he gets paid as little as £50 for nine hours labouring.
“It’s very difficult for me to live in the UK without my Indian or Pakistani community – also because there are a lot of Pakistani people who give me work in their houses for cleaning and for household things,” he adds.
‘What will become of people like us?’
Anike has lived in limbo for 12 years.
Now living in Greater Manchester, she came to the UK from Nigeria when her sister Esther was diagnosed with a brain tumour – she had a multi-entry visa but was supposed to leave after three months.
Esther had serious complications from brain surgery and says she is reliant on her sister for care.
Immigration officials are in touch with her because she has to digitally sign in every month.
Anike has had seven failed applications for leave to remain on compassionate grounds refused but is now desperate to have her status settled – afraid of the shifting public mood over migration.
“Everybody is thinking ‘what will become of people like us?'” she adds.
‘It’s a shambles’
The government can’t say with any degree of accuracy how many visa overstayers there are in Britain – no data has been collated for five-and-a-half years.
But piecing together multiple accounts from community leaders and lawyers the picture we’ve built is stark.
Immigration lawyer Harjap Singh Bhangal told us he believed there could be several hundred thousand visa overstayers currently in Britain.
He says: “At this time, there’s definitely in excess of about 200,000 people overstaying in the UK. It might even be closer to 300,000, it could even be 400,000.”
Asked what evidence he has for this he replies: “Every day I see at least one overstayer, any immigration lawyers like me see overstayers and that is the bulk of the work for immigration lawyers.
“The Home Office doesn’t have any accurate data because we don’t have exit controls. It’s a shambles. It’s an institution where every wall in the building is cracked.”
The number of those who are overstaying visas and working cash in hand is also virtually impossible to measure.
‘They know Britain is a soft country’
“They’re laughing at us because they know Britain is a soft country, where you won’t be picked up easily,” says the local man we’ve arranged to meet as part of our investigation.
We’re in Kingsbury in northwest London – an area which people say has been transformed over the past five years as post-Brexit visa opportunities opened up for people coming from South Asia.
‘Mini-Mumbai’
The man we’re talking to lives in the community and helps with events here. He doesn’t want to be identified but raises serious questions about visa abuse.
“Since the last five years, a huge amount of people have come in this country on this visiting visa, and they come with one thing in mind – to overstay and work in cash,” he says.
“This area is easy to live in because they know they can survive. It looks like as if you are walking through mini-Mumbai.”
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‘The system is more than broken’
‘It’s taxpayers who are paying’
And he claims economic migrants are regularly arriving – who’ve paid strangers to pretend they’re a friend or relative in order to obtain a visitor visa to get to Britain.
He says: “I’ve come across so many people who have come this way into this country. It’s widespread. When I talk to these people, they literally tell me, ‘Oh, someone is coming tomorrow, day after tomorrow, someone is coming’.
“Because they’re hidden they may not be claiming benefits, but they can access emergency healthcare and their children can go to school.
“And who is paying for it? It’s the taxpayers who are paying for all this,” says the man we’ve met in north London.
Read more from Sky News:
Net migration figures hit four-year low
How Denmark may inspire UK asylum reforms
A Home Office spokesperson said: “We will not tolerate any abuse of our immigration system and anyone found to be breaking the rules will be liable to have enforcement action taken against them.
“In the first year of this government, we have returned 35,000 people with no right to be here – a 13% rise compared to the previous year.
“Arrests and raids for illegal working have soared to their highest levels since records began, up 63% and 51%.”
The government can’t say with accuracy how many visa overstayers there are in Britain – no data has been collated for five-and-a-half years.
Sky News has spoken to immigration lawyers about the numbers, and one believes there could be as many as 400,000 living across the country.
Harjap Singh Bhangal described the situation as a “shambles”.
“The Home Office doesn’t have any accurate data because we don’t have exit controls. It’s a shambles. It’s an institution where every wall in the building is cracked,” he told Sky’s Lisa Holland.
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The visa overstayers in ‘soft’ Britain
Why doesn’t the government know?
The Home Office used to gather data on visa overstayers by effectively checking a list of passport numbers associated with visas against a list of passport numbers of people leaving the UK, taken from airlines and other international travel providers.
If there was a passport number match in the arrivals and departures part of their database, that person was recorded to have left when they should have. If there wasn’t, they were a potential overstayer.
They stopped producing the figures because a combination of Brexit and COVID added complications that made the Home Office conclude they wouldn’t be able to get to a reliable number using the same method.
It’s now four and a half years since EU citizens had freedom of movement to the UK revoked, and more than three and a half years since pandemic-era travel restrictions ended.
And yet we are still waiting to see what a new method might look like.
Read more from Sky News:
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There’s one big problem with Australia’s social media ban
The old method wasn’t perfect. If someone changed their passport while in the UK, for example, or if the airline or individual entered the number wrong when they were leaving, there wouldn’t be a match.
The Home Office regarded the statistics as likely overestimating the true number of overstayers, and the Office for National Statistics designated the figures as “experimental” rather than “official” statistics, meaning the conclusions should be treated with caution. But they were a reasonable best guess.
With all that in mind, between April 2016 and March 2020 upwards of 250,000 people were flagged as potential overstayers, equivalent to 63,000 per year.
That’s more than the 190,000 people who are recorded to have arrived in the UK on small boats since 2018.
It represents 3.5% of the seven million visas that expired over that period, so at least 96.5% of people left when they should.
Other Home Office data reveals that more than 13 million visas were issued between 2020 and the end of June 2025, including a record 3.4 million in 2023.
But what we don’t know is how many have expired, which means it’s difficult for us to even guess how many people might have overstayed.
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