The Guardian uncovered a series of cases showing how US military personnel are not being brought to justice in British courts. Photograph: Kathy images/Shutterstock View image in fullscreen The Guardian uncovered a series of cases showing how US military personnel are not being brought to justice in British courts. Photograph: Kathy images/Shutterstock Base justice UK news UK police should not have let US force take over airbase trial, MoD documents show According to documents obtained by the Guardian, officials accused Cambridgeshire force of breaching US-UK deal by handing over case of woman strangled by US pilot
Prefer the Guardian on Google Ministry of Defence officials have privately accused a UK police force of wrongly handing over the investigation of an American fighter pilot who strangled a British woman to the US military, according to documents obtained by the Guardian.
Cambridgeshire police allowed the US military police to quickly take control of the investigation into Capt Jacob Wulfson after he had been accused of sexually assaulting Sarah Steele in his Cambridge flat.
The decision meant Wulfson was not tried in an English criminal court. Instead he was prosecuted in a military tribunal on a US airbase in neighbouring Suffolk.
View image in fullscreen An all-male jury of Capt Jacob Wulfson’s fellow air force officers convicted him of strangling an intimate partner but acquitted him of sexual assault. Photograph: United States Air Forces Central Ministry of Defence officials said the Cambridgeshire force should “absolutely” not have let the US military police take over the investigation in a clear breach of a long-established agreement with the US.
The disclosure of the case by the Guardian in June provoked immediate criticism from Downing Street , which said it was “deeply distressing” and “very concerning” that the UK authorities were not involved in prosecuting Wulfson.
Read more The government to set up a high-level inquiry to examine how and why police forces have been transferring investigations into serious crimes to the US military police.
The Ministry of Defence, which is responsible for handling the military relationship with the US, is one of the key departments taking part in the inquiry.
A batch of documents, disclosed via the Freedom of Information Act, revealed the private views of MoD officials about the Steele case, which centres on an obscure agreement signed by the US and the UK decades ago.
Under the terms of the agreement, police in the UK have the primary right to investigate alleged crimes by Americans stationed in the country .
The MoD officials made it clear the agreement was “pretty unambiguous” and only permitted the US military to acquire jurisdiction over investigations in a “narrow set of circumstances”. These circumstances are: if the offences were committed while the Americans were on duty, or if they were committed against another member of their armed forces or property.
In a memo written on 8 July, MoD officials based in Washington wrote: “The Steele case does not, on the surface, appear to meet the bar for a visiting force to be awarded jurisdiction.” In the agreement, the US military is formally known as a visiting force.
Four days earlier, the MoD officials had referred to the Steele case in an email to colleagues, saying: “The decision-making on this specific case seemed at odds with what is very clear” in the agreement.
Another MoD official agreed that “as best as we und…