Tories ask police to publish letter on criminals

LONDON, Jan 11 (Reuters) The opposition Conservatives have called for the publication of a police letter warning the government about problems with the identification of British criminals convicted abroad.

Officials say Home Office ministers did not know about the omission until police chiefs told the a Commons committee about the issue on Tuesday.

But the Association of Chief Police Officers said late yesterday they wrote to Home Office Minister Tony McNulty about the problem last October.

Home Secretary John Reid has launched an internal inquiry to discover why 280 British criminals who had committed serious crimes in European Union states had not been in recorded in the police database.

ACPO said it had identified 540 serious offenders from a backlog of 27,500 records of overseas convictions, and had been able to enter 260 of them into the Police National Computer.

The remaining 280, mainly drug offenders, could not be included until further information was obtained from authorities abroad.

ACPO said it wrote to McNulty in October to update him on ''continuing difficulties around the exchange of criminal records across the EU''.

The police chiefs said they received a reply from another Home Office minister, Joan Ryan, who asked them to keep her officials updated.

They said the Home Office had also turned down a request for more money to deal with the backlog of criminal checks.

Conservative Home Affairs spokesman David Davis said if it was true that McNulty and Ryan had known about the missing information their position would be ''untenable''.

He called on the police chiefs to publish the correspondence in full.

ACPO said it would make no further comment on the issue. ''We are not publishing anything,'' an ACPO spokeswoman said.

The Home Office said its inquiry into the matter was due to be completed within six weeks.

''To the best of our knowledge, ministers' attention was not drawn to the backlog issue until 9 January, following the ACPO evidence to the Home Affairs Committee,'' the Home Office.

Prime Minister Tony Blair on Wednesday blamed the problem on foreign states saying that until last year there had been no formal process that obliged European authorities to provide full details of British offenders convicted in their countries.

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