Police investigating the murder of five prostitutes in England have put in place the edges of the "jigsaw puzzle" as they look at a host of suspects, a senior police officer said.
IPSWICH: Police investigating the murder of five prostitutes in England have put in place the edges of the "jigsaw puzzle" as they look at a host of suspects, a senior police officer said on Saturday.
Jacqui Cheer, Suffolk's assistant chief constable, told BBC radio that police were "looking at 50 to 100 suspects," but British media reported that the police were interested in five of them.
Detective Chief Superintendent Stewart Gull, heading the probe, said on Friday that police were "looking at a number of interesting people" but said they did not have any suspects.
Among the five suspects, The Sun newspaper said that detectives wanted to talk to a taxi driver, a businessman and a man with a liking for outdoor sex, all of whom were clients of Tania Nicol, one of the dead working girls.
One man, described as "very interesting" by an unnamed senior police source, has come to the fore of the probe, the Times said, adding that sex offenders and people associated with the drugs trade are being investigated.
Police are confident that they are getting closer to cracking the case in the sleepy town of Ipswich, in eastern England, after the discovery of five bodies in 10 days.
The victims have been confirmed as Gemma Adams, 25; Tania Nicol, 19; Anneli Alderton, 24; Paula Clennell, also 24; and Annette Nicholls, 29.
Cause of death has only been established in two cases -- Clennell died of "compression to the neck," while Alderton was strangled.
Cheer said that Alderton was three months pregnant, though the news, "sad as it may be," is not relevant to the investigation.
Investigators in the town, about 130 km northeast of London, are ploughing through thousands of calls from the public and trying to trace the victims' last movements.
"A good way to describe the progress we are making would be to compare the investigation to a jigsaw," Cheer told BBC radio. "We have constructed the edges, now we have to fill in the middle."
As part of the probe, the police are studying 10,000 hours of closed circuit television footage. "It's quite a job to go through, some of these will be released soon," Cheer said.
"We are anxious not to close any line of the enquiry," she added, still entertaining the possibility there could be more than one killer.
Ipswich's streets were deserted on Friday night, despite Christmas parties being in full swing elsewhere in the UK, as the market town lives in fear of more deaths.
Police and local drug workers are paying prostitutes to stay off the streets with money being provided by an unidentified charity.
Many have compared the killings to those committed by the notorious Jack the Ripper, who murdered five east London prostitutes in 1888, and Yorkshire Ripper Peter Sutcliffe, responsible for the deaths of 13 women between 1975 and 1980.
In one of Britain's biggest-ever murder hunts, more than 300 officers from nine police forces around the country have been drafted in to help.
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