A WORKER at the Merseyside-based Criminal Records Bureau has been sacked for attempting to find information on the couple charged in connection with the murders of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman.
The unnamed employee is believed to have bypassed security measures to find out whether any information exists on Ian Huntley and Maxine Carr.
Bosses at the CRB, based in Liverpool's Princes Dock, last week conducted an internal investigation and sacked the worker on Friday.
It is not believed the employee was trying to make any financial gain from the information.
A Home Office spokesman last night said the member of staff had been caught trying to access information he or she was not entitled to look at.
He said: "One person has been dismissed for inappropriate use of the system.
"I am not in a position to go into the details of the matter but suffice to say every member of staff at the Criminal Records Bureau is aware of what is and what is not appropriate."
The dismissal comes a week after the agency was forced to take on an extra 100 staff as it struggles to deal with thousands of applications from people who need to provide evidence of a clean criminal record before they can work with children.
CRB staff are working 24 hour shifts over the Bank Holiday to clear 23,000 applications from teachers before the September 4 deadline.
They are the applications that need urgent clearing out of a total backlog of 100,000.
Last month, Home Officer minister Hilary Benn was forced to apologise to Parliament about the poor performance of CRB after figures revealed just 25pc of cases were being dealt with inside the three-week target.
A Home Office Spokesman said they were being slowed down by late and duplicate applications.
He said: "A large number sent their applications through the post as well as using our phone line.
"We also received 3,000 applications very recently. It has to be remembered that the CRB is doing work previously done by the police and we are still exceeding the volume of weekly checks that were made under the old arrangements."
The CRB, a joint venture between the Home Office and private partner Capita, employs more than 1,000 people.
The troubled agency has sent around 30,000 confidential screenings to a data processing firm in India to help clear some of the backlog.
The CRB was established to conduct a new double check on people working with children.
First they check applicants are not on List 99, a dossier of people convicted or suspected of child abuse maintained by the Department for Education and Skills.
Then police forces for the areas in which they have lived and worked are contacted to check for any relevant criminal convictions.
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