BP Gulf spill engineer charged over 'deleted emails'

A former BP engineer was arrested last night in the US and charged with trying to destroy evidence of the extent of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

The Justice department accused Kirt Mix, 50, of trying to delete text messages between himself and a supervisor including "sensitive internal BP information collected in real time" as the company tried to stop the leak.

Mix was a drilling engineer for BP before he resigned in January this year. During the crisis he worked on a "top kill" involving pumping heavy mud into the well to try to push back the oil during the 2010 spill. Deleted texts included one that said the oil was spilling faster than it would have been doing had the top kill been working.