Ministry of Defence officials have privately accused a UK police force of wrongly handing over the investigation of an American fighter pilot who strangled a British woman to the US military, according to documents obtained by the Guardian.

Cambridgeshire police allowed the US military police to quickly take control of the investigation into Capt Jacob Wulfson after he had been accused of sexually assaulting Sarah Steele in his Cambridge flat.

The decision meant Wulfson was not tried in an English criminal court. Instead he was prosecuted in a military tribunal on a US airbase in neighbouring Suffolk.

An all-male jury of Capt Jacob Wulfson’s fellow air force officers convicted him of strangling an intimate partner but acquitted him of sexual assault.…