British police are assessing whether convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein trafficked women through London Stansted Airport on private flights, as part of a newly coordinated national effort to examine his ties to the United Kingdom. Essex Police said they are reviewing information that emerged from millions of pages of U.S. government documents on Epstein released at the end of January, focusing on records of private flights into and out of Stansted.
The force stressed that the work is currently an “assessment,” not yet a full criminal investigation, but forms part of a wider UK coordination group set up to support forces looking at Epstein’s links to Britain and British nationals. Stansted Airport, for its part, noted that it does not manage private flight operations itself and that immigration and customs checks are handled by the UK Border Force.
Interest in the airport’s role intensified after former Prime Minister Gordon Brown wrote that newly released documents showed in “graphic detail” how Epstein used the Essex hub to “fly in girls from Latvia, Lithuania and Russia,” urging police to urgently re-examine whether trafficking took place via UK territory. Brown contacted senior officers in the Metropolitan Police, Essex Police and Thames Valley Police, saying the true extent of the abuse would only become clear if the flight activity was properly scrutinised.
Earlier investigations by the BBC found that 87 flights linked to Epstein arrived at or departed from UK airports between the early 1990s and 2018, including journeys through Stansted, Heathrow, Gatwick, Luton, Birmingham, RAF Marham and Edinburgh. Passenger lists on some of these flights recorded unidentified “females,” and lawyers for alleged British victims have long called the lack of a full scale UK inquiry “shocking.”
Documents in the newly released U.S. files contain multiple references to Stansted, including discussions about whether a Russian woman with a U.S. visa could change planes there, as well as numerous mentions of UK visas more broadly. Border Force guidance requires all individuals entering the country to undergo full checks, but campaigners argue that lax oversight of private aviation has historically made it easier for traffickers to move victims undetected.
Epstein, who was found dead in a U.S. jail in 2019 while awaiting trial on federal sex trafficking charges, is now at the centre of renewed scrutiny over whether elements of his abuse network operated on British soil. United Nations experts have warned that allegations contained in the “Epstein files” may amount to crimes against humanity, and pressure is mounting on UK authorities to match U.S. efforts with a robust, transparent investigation of their own.
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