Police to investigate Facebook group

US authorities investigating the suicide of an Irish schoolgirl last month are understood to have obtained a grand jury subpoena to allow them to investigate certain discussion groups on Facebook.

Phoebe Prince, a first-year high school student at South Hadley High School in Massachusetts for only a few weeks, took her own life after she was subjected to a sustained campaign of bullying at school and on the social networking site Facebook. A number of students taunted the schoolgirl on the site and also made disparaging comments about her on a memorial page on the site following her death.

Originally from Fanore in Co Clare, Phoebe and her family moved to South Hadley in Massachusetts last September.