Cross-government inquiry scrutinises cases handed to US military courts
Ministry of Defence officials privately accused a UK police force of wrongly handing over the investigation of an American fighter pilot to the US military, according to documents obtained by The Guardian. The pilot, US Air Force Capt Jacob Wulfson, was convicted of strangling a British woman, Sarah Steele. Ministry of Defence officials said Cambridgeshire police should “absolutely” not have let US military police take over the investigation, in what they called a clear breach of a long-established agreement with the United States.
The officials’ views emerged in a batch of documents disclosed under the Freedom of Information Act. The case centres on an agreement signed by the US and the UK decades ago, under which police in the UK have the primary right to investigate alleged crimes by Americans stationed in the country. MoD officials described the agreement as “pretty unambiguous”, saying it permitted the US military to acquire jurisdiction over investigations only in a “narrow set of circumstances”: if the offences were committed while the Americans were on duty, or if they were committed against another member of their armed forces or their 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.” The US military is formally known as a visiting force under the agreement. Four days earlier, MoD officials referred to the case in an email to colleagues, saying the decision-making “seemed at odds with what is very clear” in the agreement. Another MoD official agreed that “as best as we understand the facts, this should absolutely have been for the UK courts.”
An unidentified Greater Manchester police officer wrote in an email to MoD officials on 6 July that Cambridgeshire police had “wrongly, in my view” handed over the Wulfson investigation to the US military.
Cambridgeshire police said they were conducting a review of the case with what the force called “the assistance of material provided” by US Air Force lawyers. The force said it “remained engaged with the victim”. “We are working with government, wider policing and criminal justice partners to ensure greater clarity of jurisdictional decision making,” the force said.
Wulfson was off duty when he assaulted Steele in his Cambridge flat in December 2023, after the pair talked on the Tinder dating app. Cambridgeshire police allowed US military police to take control of the investigation into him. Wulfson was not tried in an English criminal court; he was prosecuted instead at a court martial on the US airbase at Lakenheath in Suffolk.
Steele testified at the April court martial that her experience was “degrading and distressing”. The verdict and sentence were decided by an all-male jury of Wulfson’s fellow air force officers, and all the lawyers in the case were American. The Guardian reported that Steele was subjected to invasive and aggressive questioning by Wulfson’s lawyer. Wulfson was convicted of strangling an intimate partner but acquitted of sexual assault. He was dismissed from the US Air Force and confined to a military jail on Lakenheath for six months.
The Guardian disclosed the case in June, provoking immediate criticism from Downing Street, which said it was “deeply distressing” and “very concerning” that UK authorities were not involved in prosecuting Wulfson. The government then 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 cross-government inquiry includes officials from the Home Office, the Ministry of Justice and the Foreign Office, along with police chiefs, and the Ministry of Defence is one of the key departments taking part. It is scrutinising a series of cases uncovered by The Guardian this year.
According to The Guardian’s reporting, the US military aims to prosecute as many of its personnel as possible within the boundaries of its agreement with the UK. American authorities often ask police in the UK whether they can take over the prosecution of their personnel — requests the police agree to even when they hold primary responsibility for the investigations.
The Guardian’s series of cases this year highlighted concerns that British victims are required to give evidence in US courts martial, an unfamiliar legal system that often does not afford the same protections as a court in the UK. In each of the cases, police handed investigations to US military police even though the Americans involved were off duty and the British victims had no connection to the armed forces; the defendants were tried in US courts martial on American bases.
Tyrion Davis allegedly raped two women in Suffolk; he was convicted of one charge of sexual assault and cleared of 10 further counts of sexual assault and abusive sexual contact. Hannes Marschalek allegedly exposed himself to a 16-year-old girl and four young women in Littleport, Cambridgeshire. Marschalek negotiated a plea bargain at a court martial and admitted a charge of indecent conduct. He later won an appeal in a US military court that quashed his conviction on technical grounds — a ruling that is now being challenged.
The US has more than 12,000 military personnel in the UK, stationed at at least 15 bases and facilities, according to The Guardian. The two biggest bases are at Lakenheath and Mildenhall, both in Suffolk, and significant numbers of American personnel live in East Anglia.