Jersey chief to get expert help

Specialist officers at Scotland Yard are to advise the detective leading the Jersey care home abuse inquiry.

Deputy police chief Lenny Harper will meet detectives with experience of major investigations who are helping the inquiry, in London.

Search teams are continuing to clear rubble from the second of four underground chambers.

More than 100 people claim to have been abused at the Haut de la Garenne care home during the 1970s and 1980s.

A spokeswoman for Jersey Police said the London detectives had been advising on issues of best practice in conducting the investigation.

Mr Harper has said the home, which is now a youth hostel, would continue to be treated as a major crime scene, and the operation may become a murder inquiry.

But he said there was as yet no firm evidence that a murder had taken place at the former home.

A specialist sniffer dog, trained to search for blood and human remains, has given no further positive reactions since being sent into the second room on Monday afternoon.

The second chamber, which is no more than 5ft high, is three times the size of the room where police found a large concrete bath and another item, believed to be shackles.

There may be up to four rooms to be excavated, all of which were bricked up from the outside and none of which appeared in original plans of the building.

Police have already found fragments of a child's skull and other bone fragments which may be human on the site.

Detectives say they are making "good progress" in working through a backlog of documents linked to the investigation.