want full story on my children's murder, says fathe

It is a year since Jimi Ogunkoya's two children were murdered by their mother, and five years since a report into the death of Victoria Climbié which was supposed to put an end to similar tragedies.

Yet Ogunkoya claims that child welfare authorities failed his children while they were alive, and are continuing to do so by covering up the circumstances of their deaths.

Antoine, aged 10, and Kenniece, three, were killed by their mother, Ogunkoya's former partner Viviane Gamor, 30, who was diagnosed as suffering from schizophrenia. Despite her mental health problems and history of violence, Hackney social services sanctioned her unsupervised visits to the children, against Ogunkoya's wishes.

Article continues The Hackney Safeguarding Children Board is due to publish an executive summary of a report into the deaths shortly, but Ogunkoya, 33, and his parents, Clement Akin and Florence Omoyela Ogunkoya, all of whom were the children's main carers, have been told they may be denied access to the full report. Their solicitors are considering seeking a judicial review if the report is not released to the family.

"There are so many cases where children have been failed by agencies not doing their jobs properly," Ogunkoya said. "My children's death is not the first in these circumstances and sadly it won't be the last."

Hackney council said a decision had not yet been made about whether the full report would be released to the family.

Ogunkoya's concerns are echoed by Lord Laming, who led the inquiry into the death of eight-year-old Climbié in 2000, and made 108 recommendations to improve child protection in a report in January 2003.

The government introduced a policy document, Every Child Matters, and implemented the Children Act 2004. One of the recommendations was that agencies should do more to share information about children at risk. Laming expressed his frustration with the response. "I despair about the organisations that have not put in place recommendations that I judged to be little more than good, basic practice," he said last week.

Mor Dioum, director of the Victoria Climbié Foundation, which campaigns for improvements in child protection, said: "I'm aware of at least five cases since the death of Victoria Climbié where the circumstances mirror Victoria's in that the children were not hidden away and social services were involved. Two of them were in London boroughs involved in the Climbié case. We need urgent reviews of Lord Laming's reforms because we are losing the vision of Every Child Matters. In recent cases where children have died or been seriously injured, the focus tended to be on the adults."

Dioum is calling for an independent public inquiry into the deaths.Ogunkoya says that if vital information had been communicated to him about the state of Gamor's mental health he would never have allowed the children to stay overnight with her.

Instead, he was not told that she had a diagnosis of schizophrenia norwhy she had been sectioned from September to October 2006. He discovered only at her Old Bailey trial for killing her children in July 2007 she had been sectioned after she threatened her half-sister with a knife.

"Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine something like this would happen, because Viviane had never shown me that she could be violent," said Ogunkoya. "Social workers took the children out of a safe environment and put them in an unsafe one. They didn't take our views and the protection of the children seriously."

Gamor was detained indefinitely under the Mental Health Act following the trial.

Ogunkoya and his partner, Martha Atito, 28, who helped look after the children, believe he was stereotyped as a young black man who was not likely to be a good father.

"I've lost both my children, I cry constantly and don't know how I'm going to come back from this. If the authorities who were supposed to protect Antoine and Kenniece cover up what went wrong it will just rub salt into my wounds.

"They didn't tell us what was going on when my kids were alive and they're still not telling us. It's one thing if agencies do wrong and put their hands up to it, but it's another to cover things up because they can."