German prosecutors have cleared the way to extradite an ex-US Marine to Britain to face abduction charges after finding no sign he had had sex in Germany with a British schoolgirl he ran away with.
A court in Frankfurt ordered Toby Studabaker, 31, to beremanded in custody, pending extradition.
"He agreed to a kind of informal extradition. That meansthat there will be very few formal requirements to extraditehim," court spokesman Claus Michael Ullrich told reporters aftera brief hearing. He said extradition could take place in threeto 14 days.
Police arrested Studabaker in Frankfurt yesterday, endinga four-day international manhunt that fuelled fears about adults"grooming" children over the Internet, where the ex-soldierfirst made contact with 12-year-old Shevaun Pennington.
Studabaker told the court he had believed Pennington to be18 and said he had not had any sexual relationship with thegirl, Ullrich said.
"He told the court he read in the papers when in Strasbourg(France) that authorities were looking for him and the girl,"Ullrich said.
Studabaker then drove to Stuttgart in Germany to put thegirl on a plane back to Britain before calling the U.S. FederalBureau of Investigation (FBI) to turn himself in.
"There are no indications that Studabaker committed a sexcrime in Germany," Hildegard Becker-Toussaint, spokeswoman forthe state prosecutors' office, told journalists."As far as I know there will not be any charges against himin Germany," Ullrich said.
Ullrich said the international warrant for Studabaker'sarrest was issued on suspicion of abduction and sexual offencesunder the terms of Britain's 1984 Child Abduction Act and 1956Sexual Offences Act.
British police travelled to Germany with the internationalarrest warrant. They questioned Studabaker earlier onThursday.
British police said they planned also to interview Shevauntoday to try and piece together details of her journey inEurope, which sparked a probe involving detectives in Britain,France, Germany, Ireland and the United States. She was reunitedwith her distraught parents on Wednesday.
Shevaun left her home in Wigan, near Manchester, northernEngland, on Saturday. It later emerged she had gone to meetStudabaker and the pair had flown to Paris.
The previous day, he had flown from Detroit to Manchester tobe with her. Police say they had been in touch for some time viae-mail after making contact through an Internet chat room.
Studabaker was given an honourable discharge from the USmilitary on June 30 after serving for more than three years. Hewas a lance corporal based at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina.