Base justice Why did UK police hand sexual assault case to the US military?

Cambridgeshire police are facing mounting questions over their decision to allow the US military to prosecute the case of a woman who was strangled by an American fighter pilot.

- Harry Davies, Rob Evans

The force has acknowledged that, in the days after the assault in 2023, it allowed the US military to take ‘investigative primacy’ in the case, even though the crime took place within the force’s territory and when the pilot was off duty and in his flat in Cambridge city centre.

The force appears to have accepted a claim by US military investigators that the victim, Sarah Steele, ‘did not want to be contacted’ by local police about the case. However, Steele, 42, has insisted this was false.

The decision by Cambridgeshire police to cede responsibility to the US military paved the way for the pilot, Capt Jacob Wulfson, to avoid British justice. Instead, he was tried in a military tribunal at RAF Lakenheath, a US airbase in neighbouring Suffolk.

Wulfson was convicted at the court martial in April of strangling Steele on their first in-person encounter after the pair met on a dating app. He was acquitted of penetrating her without her consent and doing so knowing she had been drugged, an offence that was charged as sexual assault and ‘aggravated sexual contact’.

In an English court, an offence of sexual penetration without consent would probably have been categorised as rape.

The jury in the court martial consisted of an all-male panel of Wulfson’s fellow air force officers, all stationed at the same base as him. These men also decided his sentence: six months in a correctional facility.

Last week, Steele described her ‘degrading and distressing’ experience of going through the US military justice system as a victim. She believes that the system, which was unfamiliar to her, ‘picked me up, chewed me out’.

The Guardian’s investigation, part of a series of reports into British crimes prosecuted on US military bases, prompted widespread concern. The UK government has pledged to look into the case, which the prime minister’s spokesperson said was ‘deeply distressing’.