Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain has urged Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor to testify before a congressional committee over his dealings with the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, following the release of photographs appearing to show the former British prince kneeling over a woman lying on the ground.
Mr. Starmer’s comments, made on Saturday to reporters traveling with him, increase the pressure on Mr. Mountbatten-Windsor, who was asked in November by Democrats in Congress to give evidence to an investigation.
At the time, Mr. Starmer supported the principle of those with information coming forward, but said that the request was something Mr. Mountbatten-Windsor should consider personally. That position appeared to toughen somewhat this weekend when the prime minister was asked directly about the case during a four-day visit to Asia.
“Anybody who has got information should be prepared to share that information in whatever form they are asked to do that,” Mr. Starmer told reporters, Reuters reported. “You can’t be victim-centered if you’re not prepared to do that.”
Formerly known as Prince Andrew and the Duke of York, Mr. Mountbatten-Windsor was stripped of his royal titles in October by his brother King Charles III because of the growing questions around his links to Mr. Epstein, a financier, who died in prison in 2019.
Mr. Mountbatten-Windsor is also scheduled to move out of his home at the Royal Lodge in Windsor, a 30-room Georgian mansion that sits on 98 acres of land west of London where he has lived since 2003, to a more modest residence on the royal estate in Sandringham, which is privately owned by the monarch.
The latest embarrassing photographs, which dominated several newspaper front pages in Britain on Sunday, emerged with the release on Friday by the Justice Department of more than three million pieces of evidence, including thousands of images. It was the largest batch of files related to the Epstein case to be made public to date.
Two images appear to show Mr. Mountbatten-Windsor kneeling over an unidentified, fully-clothed woman in an unspecified location while touching her stomach and waist. In a third, he looks at the camera while on all fours next to the woman. In all pictures, her face has been redacted.
The latest batch of documents also included a 2010 email exchange between Mr. Epstein and Mr. Mountbatten-Windsor, adding new details to what has been publicly known about the long friendship between the men.
Mr. Mountbatten-Windsor did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the latest images. Buckingham Palace also did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Around 2001, Mr. Epstein trafficked Virginia Roberts Giuffre, then 17, to have sex with the now former prince, according to legal filings. Mr. Mountbatten-Windsor has denied that he raped her and has denied any wrongdoing in relation to his friendship with Mr. Epstein.
Beyond the images of Mr. Mountbatten-Windsor, there was one of Peter Mandelson, the former British ambassador to the United States, in his underwear, talking to a woman wearing a bathrobe. Mr. Mandelson was fired in September over his links to Mr. Epstein.
Reverberations of the files released on Friday were also felt more widely. In Slovakia, the prime minister, Robert Fico, announced this weekend that he had accepted the resignation of his national security adviser, Miroslav Lajcak, after the release of messages from 2018 between Mr. Lajcak and Mr. Epstein in which they discussed women and a forthcoming meeting with the Russian foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov.
Stephen Castle is a London correspondent of The Times, writing widely about Britain, its politics and the country’s relationship with Europe.
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