Britain’s €19,000 injunction to hide child killers’ identity

THE British Government has spent £13,000 (€19,000) of taxpayers’ money preventing overseas magazines revealing the new identities of the James Bulger murderers, it was revealed yesterday.

Home Office figures showed the sum went on legal fees, VAT and other costs.

Strict guidelines restricting media coverage of Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, now both aged 24, were imposed by the High Court in January 2001 to protect them from revenge attacks.

They were granted an open-ended High Court injunction protecting their anonymity.

Former president of the Family Division of the High Court Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss said that the two had to be protected due to a “real possibility of serious physical harm and possible death from vengeful members of the public or from the Bulger family”.

A Home Office spokes- person said the spending related to obtaining a specific injunction against a foreign title. “There are always certain legal costs associated with an injunction from the courts,” she said. “Costs in this particular case are not out of the ordinary.

“An injunction was obtained in this case to prevent publication of information that would lead to the whereabouts of the two offenders, as there was strong and credible evidence of a threat to their lives.”

The pair were 10 years old when they abducted two- year-old James Bulger outside a butcher shop in the Strand shopping area in Bootle, Merseyside in 1993.

They walked him more than a mile to a railway line and killed him.

James’s body had 22 lacerations and his skull was fractured in 10 places. His broken body was left on a railway line, and when his remains were found two days later it had been cut in half by a passing train. The act was described by the trial judge, Mr Justice Morland, as “an act of unparalleled evil and barbarity”.

In 2001, the Parole Board ruled that Thompson and Venables were no longer a danger to the public after they had spent eight years in secure accommodation.