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| Saturday, 23 June, 2001, 13:34 GMT 14:34 UK Bulger killers win freedom ![]() Jon Venables and Robert Thompson, now aged 18, have spent eight years in secure accommodation for the murder of two-year-old James Bulger in 1993. They have been freed on life licences. Below, BBC News Online looks back at the sequence of events surrounding the case. 23 June 2001
The Manchester Evening News is in talks with the Attorney General after it published information on the whereabouts of Robert Thompson and Jon Venables. The BBC's John Thorne reports. 22 June 2001
The killers of James Bulger have been released on life licences by the Parole Board. Robert Thompson and Jon Venables have been given new, secret identities.
18 June 2001
Protesters demonstrate outside the Parole Board headquarters in London against the expected decision to free the killers of James Bulger. Jon Venables' case was the first to be heard, taking place at a secret location.
26 October 2000
Jon Venables and Robert Thompson could be freed within months after the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Woolf, ruled the process of parole could begin immediately. His decision provokes stiff opposition from many people on Merseyside.
16 December 1999
The Home Secretary Jack Straw has promised changes to the way juveniles are prosecuted after the European Court of Human Rights ruling on the Bulger case. The Strasbourg judges decided that the killers of Merseyside toddler James Bulger did not receive a fair trial. 24 November 1993
Thompson and Venables are named by the presiding Judge, Mr Justice Morland, after a jury convicts them of murdering James Bulger. As well as losing their anonymity the boys, both aged 10, are sentenced to secure youth accommodation with a recommendation they serve at least eight years. 12 February 1993
The murder of two-year-old James Bulger, who was abducted from a busy shopping centre in Bootle, on Merseyside, leaves the whole country in shock. Detectives investigating the killing say he was horrifically murdered. His body was found on a railway line two miles from where his mother last saw him.
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