US troops are avoiding justice for alleged crimes committed in the UK. And that is one more thing you can add to the long list of reasons US military colonies need to be kicked out of Britain.
The Week reported on 8 July that two US military personnel had escaped proper justice for crimes committed in the UK. This was due to them being court-martialed under US military law, not in British courts.
The outlet reported:
Four women and a 16-year-old girl accused US airman Hannes Marschalek of indecent exposure in 2022, while he was stationed at RAF Lakenheath in Suffolk, the largest US airbase in the UK.
Despite the Royal Air Force (RAF) designation, Lakenheath is a US military base. The Week reported:
Cambridgeshire police initiated the investigation, but the case was turned over to American forces three weeks later.
Marschalek accepted a plea bargain and was dismissed from the air force by a military judge and sentenced to two months in a correctional facility at Lakenheath.
Then in April 2026:
a US military appeal court dismissed the guilty verdict on the grounds that prosecutors had charged him under the wrong offence. He remains on the sex-offender registry in the US, but had he been “prosecuted in the English criminal courts, Marschalek would have faced up to two years in jail”.
And that is not all:
In December 2023, Sarah Steele accused Jacob Wulfson, a US air force captain also based at Lakenheath, of drugging, assaulting and strangling her after meeting via a dating app.
In the end, Wulfson got off lightly. He was:
convicted of strangulation, dismissed from the military and given “six months’ detention”, but was cleared of sexual assault by an “all-male panel” of air force officers.
Steele, who bravely waived her anonymity to speak out, later described how she was asked bizarre questions by the all-male military ‘jury’. The Guardian wrote at the time:
Had his [Wulfson’s] case been heard in the British criminal justice system, legal experts say, Wulfson would probably have been tried for rape. Any sentence would have been determined by a judge.
US troops and their military colonies
The nature of US/UK relations is at the centre of the scandal. As The Week explained:
American forces in the UK are governed by the 1951 Nato Status of Forces Agreement, which was incorporated into British law in the Visiting Forces Act 1952.
Outside of a set of narrow criteria “the British police have jurisdiction”:
However, in practice, the “process is ambiguous”. In the cases involving Marschalek and Wulfson, local British police handed control over to the US. The US military is claiming a “much wider jurisdiction – and British police and prosecutors are allowing them to do it”.
But this is not the first time US personnel have escaped justice for crimes committed in the UK. In 2019, a US spy hit and killed Suffolk teenager Harry Dunn with her car. Anne Sacoolas — who was not identified as a spy until much later — was rapidly whisked out of the UK.
As the Canary reported in 2021:
A Virginia court heard that Sacoolas was “employed by an intelligence agency in the US” at the time of the crash and that her work has been “especially a factor” in her rapid return to the States.
Sacoolas had been working at RAF Croughton. The facility is a major US spy base described by independent researchers at Croughtonwatch as:
part of a global electronic communications, control and surveillance network that projects American military power across Europe, North Africa and the Middle East.
Declassified UK reported in February 2026 that there were 24 US military and intelligence bases in the UK. The outlet said:
This doesn’t cover the full scale of the US military presence in the UK, since it is believed that US military personnel are frequently, if not permanently, stationed at still more sites, such as the key Royal Navy bases at Coulport, Devonport and Faslane.
US military bases need to go for many reasons. One of these is the erratic, violent nature of an empire falling apart under president Donald Trump. But beyond the power politics of the US/UK alliance, these facilities are a clear and present danger to the safety of UK citizens.
Featured image via the Canary
By Joe Glenton
