A COUNCILLOR heading the investigation into Portsmouth City Council’s handling of the Ashya King case has quit claiming the inquiry has been unfairly blocked within the council.

Cllr Alistair Thompson, 36, said he had stepped down as chairman of the council’s scrutiny panel in frustration over his attempts to investigate the case.

In his letter of resignation, he alleged that council officers had been barred from being involved in the review and that his panel had not been given enough power to investigate the handling of the affair properly.

However council leader Cllr Donna Jones dismissed the resignation as a disagreement between Cllr Thompson and the city council’s chief executive over who should be in charge of the investigation.

She insisted that the council’s position was that the Portsmouth Children Safeguarding Board should carry out an independent inquiry into the Ashya King affair before the city council’s own probe was done.

She said: “These things happen every day in local government.”

The council came under fire for making an application for five-year-old Ashya, from Southsea, to be made a ward of court after his parents removed him from Southampton General Hospital after disagreements with doctors over his treatment for a brain tumour.

The authority obtained an order making the High Court the boy’s legal guardian after police launched a missing persons hunt for the family who were eventually found in Malaga, Spain.

This order has been been lifted.

Ashya is now in Prague, where he is undergoing a 30-session course of proton beam treatment which is not available from the NHS.