A man convicted of killing two 10-year-old schoolgirls in one of Britain's highest-profile murder cases has been found unconscious in his prison cell after a suspected drug overdose, the Home Office said yesterday.

Ian Huntley was convicted in December 2003 of the double murder of Jessica Chapman and Holly Wells in the Cambridgeshire village of Soham in August 2002 and sentenced to life in jail.

An inquiry into the murders found that Huntley had managed to get a job as a caretaker at the local school despite being a suspected sex offender. He lured the two girls to his house, killed them and then dumped their naked bodies in a ditch.

A Home Office spokeswoman said Huntley, who was kept in Wakefield prison in west Yorkshire, northern England, had been taken to hospital.

"He is under heavy sedation while receiving treatment for what is believed to be an overdose," she said.

Huntley, 32, attempted suicide in June 2003 while he was awaiting trial. Media reports at the time said he had saved up and taken 29 anti-depressant pills all at once and was found suffering a fit on the floor of his cell.

Huntley's latest suspected suicide attempt is not the first bid by a notorious convicted killer to end a lifetime in jail.

In 2004, also at Wakefield, Britain's most prolific serial killer Harold Shipman committed suicide by hanging himself with prison bed sheets just before his 58th birthday.

John Powley, a governor at the school where Huntley worked, told local media: "I am sure there are some people in Soham who would wish him to die and say good riddance to bad rubbish."

"My view is that he committed a heinous crime. He was properly convicted and now he should serve his sentence. If that means he spends the rest of his life in prison, so be it."

News about Huntley will again raise questions about jail security for prisoners who may attempt suicide.

The Home Office recommended tightening controls on dispensing medication and improving cell searches.

But some prison security experts believe no jail will be 100 per cent suicide-proof.

"One day people like Ian Huntley will be successful... This time the prison service was lucky," said Mark Leech, the editor of the Prisons Handbook, a guide to prisons in England and Wales.

"No matter how good the prison service are in their anti-suicide procedures, their attempts to prevent the trafficking of drugs in prison, it is not an exact science," he told BBC radio.

"There will always be an occasion when attention is diverted. Tablets are small."

(China Daily 09/06/2006 page7)