Senior Scotland Yard detectives were meeting today to discuss their next move in the search for Jill Dando’s killer after Barry George was acquitted of her murder last week.

The unsolved investigation, launched when the Crimewatch presenter was shot dead on the doorstep of her Fulham home in 1999, is one of the most obvious and well-documented failures of London’s Metropolitan Police.

This morning, a police spokesman refused to confirm or deny reports that officers have given the go-ahead for a cold-case review, which would mean re-examining the intelligence, witness statements and forensic evidence gathered in one of the highest profile murder inquiries in recent decades.

The cold-case team would then decide whether there were sufficient new lines of inquiry to re-open the murder investigation first launched nine years ago.

It is likely that another police force, probably from a large urban area such as Birmingham or Manchester, would be brought in to review the vast body of evidence including 2,500 witness statements and 3,700 exhibits.

At Scotland Yard today there will be a meeting between Commander Simon Foy, head of the Yard’s homicide and serious crime unit, Detective Chief Superintendent Hamish Campbell, who was in charge of the original Dando inquiry and John Yates, the Met’s Assistant Commissioner.

“They will be discussing the next steps to take,” a Scotland Yard spokesman said.

Mr George, who left the Old Bailey as a free man last week, gave interviews this weekend claiming that he could not have killed the BBC television presenter because he was stalking another woman at the time of the murder.

“I will look anyone in the eye and state I have not killed Jill Dando,” he told Sky News, saying that he was willing to take a lie detector test in order to further clear his name.

Mr George was arrested a year after Dando was killed by a single shot to the head on her own doorstep in April 1999, he admits that he pestered women and was once guilty of an attempted rape but he denies any part in the murder of the BBC’s “golden girl”.

One of the key pieces of evidence in the original prosecution case against Mr George was a single speck of firearms residue found in the pocket of his coat.

In November last year his conviction was quashed after it emerged that the residue, although of the same type as that found on the victim, could have come from other sources.

At the retrial, judge Mr Justice Griffith Williams ruled out the firearms evidence but allowed jurors to hear about Mr George’s stalking.

Ian Horrocks, who as a detective inspector with the Metropolitan Police was second in command in the original investigation, said that while he accepted the result of the retrial he “agreed with the first jury’s verdict”.

Writing in the News of the World, Mr Horrocks, who is now retired, said it was ridiculous to suggest police had just “picked the local nutter off the street and charged him with a murder we wanted to solve”.

“A lot of the evidence against George was circumstantial, but it could not be ignored,” he said.

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