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IPSWICH- British police are continuing their manhunt despite the arrest of a 37-year-old man over the murders of five prostitutes in the eastern port town of Ipswich.
The suspect, identified in media reports as local supermarket worker Tom Stephens, was arrested at his home in Trimley, just outside Ipswich, said investigation head Detective Chief Superintendent Stewart Gull.
Yesterday's arrest came after police found the bodies of five prostitutes within 10 days - Gemma Adams, 25, Tania Nicol, 19, 24-year-olds Anneli Alderton and Paula Clennell, and 29-year-old Annette Nicholls.
Police have refused to name the man they arrested.
At the weekend, Stephens gave a newspaper interview in which he insisted he was innocent but admitted to knowing all five of the women and being unable to explain where he was at the times of the killings.
"I don't have alibis for some of the times. Actually I'm not entirely sure I have tight alibis for any of the times," he told the Sunday Mirror. He maintained his innocence in the interview, however.
Both The Times and The Sun tabloid reported, citing unidentified police sources, that detectives were less than 50 per cent certain they had the killer.
"Stephens is probably no more than midway on a scale of ten -- about four or five," an unnamed senior detective told The Times, while an unidentified source told The Sun that "there are other fish to fry".
The Times also reported that detectives were looking at five other suspects, citing police officers close to the investigation.
According to The Guardian, Stephens was interviewed by police four days after the first of the five women disappeared in October, and his home was searched late last month.
Stephens also invited all five victims to his home for a party weeks before the first of them went missing, the Daily Mirror tabloid reported.
The newspaper said, citing unidentified sources close to the investigation, that police were trying to trace all the men who attended it.
Under British law, police can detain the suspect for up to four days before either charging him or releasing him, although they will have to seek a judge's permission to go beyond the second day.
The arrested suspect, who has not been charged, was taken to a police station somewhere in the county of Suffolk for questioning.
The village where the arrest took place is just a few kilometres southeast of Ipswich and very near Levington, where the bodies of the last two victims, Clennell and Nicholls, were found nearly a week ago.
All the Ipswich bodies were found naked in countryside on the outskirts of the town, 130km northeast of London, sparking fears of a serial killer on the loose.
The case has triggered comparisons with Yorkshire Ripper Peter Sutcliffe, convicted of the murders of 13 women between 1975 and 1980, and Jack the Ripper, who killed five east London prostitutes in 1888.
None of the bodies showed signs of having been subjected to significant trauma or serious sexual assault before dying, fuelling speculation that the killer might have been a drug dealer who doped them.
Sky News reported that Stephens had previously been a special constable, a voluntary part-time community police officer. An unnamed police source also told the Sunday Mirror detectives believed he worked as a part-time cab driver.
Neighbours of the suspect described him as "tall, thin and strange."
"He was a bit of a weirdo," said Lesley-Anne Barber, 50, whose garden backs on to his in the quiet village of Trimley.
Almost 500 officers are working on what has become one of Britain's biggest-ever manhunts, with 350 drafted in from 31 police forces around the country, including Northern Ireland, to help Suffolk police.
The investigation began on December 2 when 25-year-old Adams's body was found in a stream. Police discovered 19-year-old Nicol's body in the same stream on December 8.
Alderton, 24, who was three months pregnant, was asphyxiated and Clennell, 24, was killed by "compression to the neck", police said. Nicholls, 29, was the fifth victim.
Sex workers have been urged to stay off the streets but some are ignoring warnings and still working, many to feed drug addictions. The five dead women were all drug users.
Prostitution is legal in the country but advertising sexual services, streetwalking, brothels and kerb crawling -- driving slowly to ask women for sex -- are all against the law.
The case has sparked calls for better protection for prostitutes, or the legalisation of brothels so that women do not have to solicit for sex on the street.
- AFP, REUTERS
