Enigma machine: Man held

Police were questioning a man last night in connection with the stolen German Enigma coding machine.

The machine, which cracked the Nazi Enigma code during the Second World War, was taken in daylight from a glass cabinet at Bletchley Park museum in Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire, in full view of visitors at an open day last weekend.

Yesterday police revealed that they had arrested a 50-year-old man from Bedfordshire on suspicion of theft and were questioning him at Milton Keynes. The Enigma - thought to be one of only three in the world and worth up to £100,000 - has not been recovered. It was used by the Germans to send top-secret messages during the war.

BT, which owns the museum, offered a £5,000 reward for the return of the machine earlier this week. British agents, working in secrecy at Station X, as Bletchley was known, cracked the code, which the Germans believed unbreakable.