Police spent £130,000 and 2,250 hours before deciding the 'Croydon cat killer' was foxes, figures show

Police spent £130,000 and 2,250 hours on the hunt for the "Croydon cat killer" before finding out the pets had probably been hit by cars then mutilated by foxes, new figures reveal.

A dedicated team of four officers worked full-time on the case, trying to find out who had killed and mutilated up to 400 cats, according to data released to BuzzFeed News under a Freedom of Information request. As many as 15 officers were reportedly working on the case at any one time.

The Metropolitan Police also spent £6,000 on cat post-mortems in one year alone during the three-year hunt for the "killer".

It dedicated an estimated 2,250 police hours to the search, named "Operation Takahe" from 2016 to 2018, costing over £130,000.

The force could not give a figure of total money spent on the case as "records that would allow the exact time that officers/members have spent on the investigation are not held."

In September, the Metropolitan Police announced that the case into the killer was closed as officers admitted the deaths can be attributed to vehicles and foxes.

Scotland Yard announced that there was no evidence for human involvement, after a leading veterinarian reviewed six cat autopsies. While initial post-mortems by veterinary pathologists indicated that sharp objects were used to mutilate the corpses of cats which died by blunt force trauma, police concluded this was probably not the case after further investigation.

The force explained at the time: “Following a thorough examination of the available evidence, officers working alongside experts have concluded that hundreds of reported cat mutilations in Croydon and elsewhere were not carried out by a human and are likely to be the result of predation or scavenging by wildlife."

Despite the explanation, some sceptics believe that there really is a killer dismembering Britain's cats and that the police are mistaken in their conclusion. Animal charity South Norwood Animal Rescue and Liberty (SNARL) said it still views the deaths as suspicious.

Boudicca Rising, one of SNARL's two co-founders, told the website: "At the end of the day the police came to the conclusion that we didn't agree with, because we have very clear indication, in some of these cases, of human involvement.

"Body parts don't get returned six months later via foxes. Unless you've got some really, really clever foxes who are able to mimic human behaviour with freezers and storages lock-ups.

"So we made a decision to continue the investigation. From that perspective it's irrelevant to us how much the police spent. That's up to them, that's their business."