Paper told to justify Bulger report

Thomson and Venables are being given new identities

LONDON, England -- The British government's top lawyer says a regional newspaper may have breached an injunction surrounding the teenage killers of toddler James Bulger.

The Manchester Evening News published a report on Friday just hours after a parole board said that Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, now both 18, would soon be set free.

The report included details on the location of the two boys.

The injunction bans the media from any mention of new identities the pair will be given or their whereabouts.

IN-DEPTH The James Bulger Case   • Case overview   • Killers' new lives   • Internet threat   • Memories of horror   • Killers and victims   • Blunkett statement   • Timeline of events   From TIME   • Killer boys grow up   • Photo essay   Court rulings   • 1997: House of Lords   • 1999: European Court   • 2000: Lord Chief Justice   Related sites   • Justice for James   • UK Parole Board   News archive   • Pleas for restraint   • Press breach probed   • Reformers welcome move   • Parents' fury at release   • Freedom for killers   • Killers face hurdle   • Anger at decision   • Sentence review due   • European court ruling

"We have asked (the newspaper) to provide us with legal representations. In our opinion we think they did breach the injunction with the material they published on Friday," a spokesman for newly-appointed Attorney General Lord Goldsmith told Reuters.

"We would like to hear their response as soon as possible."

The government said last week that Thompson and Venables, who battered Bulger to death when they were 10 years old, are to be freed after serving less than nine years of their sentence.

Home Secretary David Blunkett appealed for calm and said he feared the pair were in danger from people "sick at mind."

Few crimes in British history have aroused as much revulsion as the murder of Bulger.

His killers had mercilessly beaten the toddler to death with an iron bar and bricks, then put his body on the tracks in the hope that a train would run over it, hiding evidence of their fatal blows.

James Bulger was taken from a shopping centre

With the government struggling to keep the killers' new identities and whereabouts secret, Britain's Times newspaper reported on Monday that a recent photograph of Thompson was being sought by foreign magazines willing to pay up to £35,000($49,500) for its use.

Publications in Spain, France and Italy -- not subject to the English court injunction -- were anxious to obtain a closed-circuit television image of Thompson taken as he was visiting a shopping centre during his rehabilitation, the paper said.