The feudal powers of the seigneur, including the right to settle disputes and to demand labour from his tenants, have largely gone, but the titles remain.After years of arguing that Advocate Falle’s claims are nonsense, the most senior of the island’s governing committees agreed the out-of-court settlement earlier this year. The committee, chaired by Frank Walker, the nearest the island has to a “prime minister, decided that while the risk of losing may be small, the scale of the potential loss is too large. The island has been reclaiming land since the Sixties and many important buildings, including power and gas stations, now stand on reclamation sites.Les Pas was created in 1987 with a plan to reclaim land south of Jersey’s capital, St Helier, for a leisure village and marina, but the plan was blocked by the States. It says the £200 spent on the feudal rights was dwarfed by the money it spent planning the project.Advocate Falle says he had been vilified at public meetings on the island and is considering suing some of the campaigners for defamation. “I know people are saying it is revenge or greed, but the nature of the action is simply asking the States to show a title to the land or to quit the land.”The reaction to the proposed out-of-court deal has been furious because of accusations of conflicts of interest and chumminess in the business elite. Several members of Senator Walker’s committee are CI Traders shareholders and he has faced personal criticism.

Anti-Les Pas campaigners hope public fury will tip the States into rejecting or delaying the out-of-court deal, bolstered by the no votes in the newspaper and local television phone polls.But Jersey is an island dominated by the finance industry, where money talks and realpolitik usually triumphs, so Senator Walker is confident of a rubber stamp.”I can well understand the anger over apparently being held to ransom, and the morality of the situation is seriously questionable, of that there is no doubt,” he said. “If I was a member of the public looking at the information available to them, I would be one of those voting against, but members of the States are more clearly aware of the legal issues and the potential downside.”. The fingerprints of a Briton alleged to have killed two teenagers in Spain are being sent to Scotland Yard to find out if he committed a series of sexual assaults in London almost 20 years ago. He was arrested last Thursday and confessed he killed 17-year-old Sonia Carabantes in August and 19-year-old Rocio Wanninkhof in 1999. Detectives said DNA samples from the 38-year-old matched samples from the crime scenes.Mr King, originally from Holloway in north London, apparently told officers he had raped at least three other women in Spain. In Britain, five of the seven victims of the Holloway attacks were throttled with rope.One had her face smashed against the pavement, breaking her nose and jaw Bromwich was released after five years. He was jailed again for robbing a woman at gunpoint and freed in 1996.

He is said to have changed his name before moving to the Costa del Sol in 1997. Interpol is sending copies of his fingerprints to the Metropolitan Police to see if they match the prints taken from Bromwich. A police source said: “We are pretty certain it’s him.”Mr King was arrested after his girlfriend told police that he had returned home on the morning Ms Carabantes disappeared with bloodstained clothes and a scratched face.Crowds shouted abuse at the suspect on Sunday as he left the Civil Guard barracks in the small town of Coin, where he was questioned for more than 10 hours before going to Malaga prison. He was put in isolation for his own protection and placed on suicide watch. A second Briton, Robert Graham, is also in custody and being questioned on suspicion of helping King cover up the crimes.The Spanish teenagers were found strangled and naked.

Ms Carabantes disappeared from her home town of Coin on the morning of 14 August. Her corpse was found five days later.Ms Wanninkhof had been stabbed 11 times and her throat had been slashed. She was found three weeks after she disappeared from Mijas in October 1999. She had worked as an au pair for Cliff Stanford, founder of the technology company Redbus Interhouse.A friend of the Wanninkhof family, Dolores Vazquez, was imprisoned for the teenager’s murder but released after a retrial. Detectives are re- examining the unsolved cases of other young women murdered since Mr King has been living in Spain.. “How can they pull the rug from under us in this way when we are so close to trial?” asks Jackie Eckton, of this month’s decision to remove public funding for the legal action by more than 1,000 claimants against the makers of the controversial measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) jab. Her eight-year-old son, Daniel, developed autism shortly after receiving the triple vaccination and ever since then Eckton has put her faith in the courts to prove a link that the Government has refused to investigate.