Ministry of Defence officials privately concluded that Cambridgeshire police should not have handed the investigation of an American fighter pilot accused of assaulting a British woman to US military authorities, documents obtained by the Guardian reveal. Capt Jacob Wulfson was subsequently prosecuted at a US airbase in Suffolk rather than in an English criminal court.
The documents, released under the Freedom of Information Act, concern the handling of Sarah Steele’s case and a longstanding agreement governing jurisdiction over American military personnel in Britain. Under that agreement, UK police have the primary right to investigate alleged crimes. Defence officials said US jurisdiction was limited to circumstances involving offences committed on duty or against members of the American armed forces or their property.
In a memo dated 8 July, MoD officials in Washington said the known circumstances of Steele’s case did not appear to justify giving the US military jurisdiction. An email sent four days earlier questioned whether the decision was consistent with the agreement. Another defence official said their understanding of the facts indicated that UK courts should have handled the case. A Greater Manchester police officer expressed a similar view in an email on 6 July.
Wulfson was off duty when he assaulted Steele at his Cambridge flat in December 2023, after they had spoken through the dating app Tinder. His court martial took place in April at Lakenheath airbase in Suffolk. Steele described her experience as “degrading and distressing”. She faced invasive and aggressive questioning from Wulfson’s lawyer, with American lawyers conducting the proceedings and an all-male jury of fellow air force officers determining the verdict and sentence.
The tribunal convicted Wulfson of strangling an intimate partner and acquitted him of sexual assault. He was dismissed from the US Air Force and confined to a military jail at Lakenheath for six months. When the Guardian disclosed the case in June, Downing Street expressed concern and distress that British authorities had not been involved in his prosecution.
A high-level government inquiry is examining how serious criminal investigations have been transferred to US military police. It includes the MoD, Home Office, Ministry of Justice, Foreign Office and police chiefs. Cambridgeshire police said they were reviewing Steele’s case with material supplied by US Air Force lawyers and remained in contact with her. The force said it was working with government, policing and criminal justice partners to clarify jurisdiction decisions.
The inquiry is scrutinising several cases reported by the Guardian this year in which British police transferred investigations involving off-duty Americans and British victims with no armed forces connection. The US military seeks to prosecute as many of its personnel as the agreement allows and frequently requests control of cases. British police have agreed to such requests even where they held primary responsibility. The cases have raised concerns about victims giving evidence in an unfamiliar system that often provides different protections from UK courts.
Among those cases, Tyrion Davis was accused of raping two women in Suffolk. He was convicted of one sexual assault charge and cleared of 10 further counts of sexual assault and abusive sexual contact. Hannes Marschalek, accused of exposing himself to a 16-year-old girl and four young women in Littleport, Cambridgeshire, admitted indecent conduct through a court martial plea bargain. His conviction was later quashed on technical grounds by a US military court, a ruling now being challenged.
More than 12,000 American military personnel are stationed across at least 15 bases and facilities in the UK. Lakenheath and Mildenhall, both in Suffolk, are the largest bases, and significant numbers of US personnel live in East Anglia.
