BRITISH POLICE WARNED SPAIN

BRITISH police warned their Spanish counterparts five years ago about a Briton suspected of murdering two teenage girls in Spain, the Spanish interior minister acknowledged on Wednesday night. “There was a message in 1998 from Interpol... about certain records in Britain and a warning about the activities that this individual was involved in,” Angel Acebes told reporters at a ceremony broadcast on public television. But he said the message about Tony King from British police, passed on through Interpol, was one of thousands Spain received each year. It was not clear precisely what the warning said. Spanish police arrested the man whom they have identified as Tony Alexander King as part of a high-profile investigation after the murder of 17-year-old Sonia Carabantes in mid-August. He is also suspected of the 1999 killing of 19-year-old Rocio Wanninkhof, Spanish police have said.
Both were murdered near the southern Spanish resort of Marbella. The murder of Carabantes, who disappeared while returning home from a village festival and was found days later by neighbours, shocked Spain and sparked a huge manhunt. King, a 38-year-old barman, was arrested last Thursday at his home on the Costa del Sol, where thousands of British expatriates live. The arrest has prompted a spate of soul-searching in Spain about the country's police and justice system, after investigators apparently overlooked King to focus on a family friend as the main suspect in Wanninkhof's murder. “(The arrest) has opened a huge gap in the credibility of the police conduct and the judicial system as regards the investigation into the murder of Rocio Wanninkhof,” Spain's El Pais newspaper said in an editorial on Tuesday. Dolores Vazquez was tried and found guilty of the killing but released when a higher court ordered a retrial. She has always said she is innocent, although charges against her have not been dropped.