£13,000 Spent protecting Bulger killers' identities

The Government has spent £13,000 of taxpayers' money preventing overseas magazines revealing the new identities of the James Bulger murderers, it was revealed today.

Home Office figures - disclosed under the Freedom of Information Act - showed the sum went on legal fees, VAT and other costs.

Strict guidelines restricting media coverage of Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, now both 24, were imposed by the High Court in January 2001 to protect them from revenge attacks.

They were granted an open-ended High Court injunction protecting their anonymity.

Former Family Division President Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss said in the High Court that the two had to be protected due to a "real possibility of serious physical harm and possible death from vengeful members of the public or from the Bulger family".

A Home Office spokeswoman said the spending related to obtaining a specific injunction against a foreign title.

"There are always certain legal costs associated with an injunction from the courts," she said.

"Costs in this particular case are not out of the ordinary.

"An injunction was obtained in this case to prevent publication of information that would lead to the whereabouts of the two offenders, as there was strong and credible evidence of a threat to their lives."

The pair were aged 10 when they abducted two-year-old James Bulger from outside a butcher's in the Strand shopping precinct in Bootle, Merseyside, in 1993.

They walked him more than a mile to a railway line and killed him.

Blue paint was thrown in the toddler's eye - at this point he was still able to beg the older boys not to hurt him, Venables said.

James's socks, shoes, trousers and underpants were removed, he was hit in the face and kicked in the groin.

A brick was thrown into the little boy's face, and further bricks were thrown at him.

He was beaten around the head with a metal bar and a branch.

James's body had 22 lacerations and his skull was fractured in 10 places.

There was a patterned bruise on his right cheek caused from a blow from a shoe.

His broken body was left on a railway line, and when his remains were found two days later it had been cut in half by a passing train.

The act was described by the trial judge, Mr Justice Morland, as "an act of unparalleled evil and barbarity".

In 2001, the Parole Board ruled that Thompson and Venables were no longer a danger to the public after they had spent eight years in secure accommodation.

The legal bar on identifying them applies in the UK but it would not necessarily apply to foreign magazines which attempted to track down the murderers and identify them in their new lives.

Venables and Thompson have new names known only to a small circle of officials.