A man aged 91 has confessed to the murder of a prostitute outside a Soho nightclub nearly 70 years ago.

The British expat walked into a police station near his home in Canada to admit to the killing in 1946 after he had been diagnosed with cancer.

He said he had shot the woman with a Russian-made Second World War pistol outside the Blue Lagoon club in Carnaby Street in 1946 after she had cheated him out of money.

However, the pensioner, who now lives in a care home, could not remember the name of the alleged victim.

The Canadian authorities contacted Scotland Yard and homicide detectives scoured through old files of the unsolved murders of women at the time.

Detectives travelled to Canada and the 91-year-old man picked out a picture of call girl Margaret Cook, 26, who was originally from Bradford.

No-one was arrested for the murder at the time, though if her killer had been convicted he would have faced the death penalty, which was not abolished until 1965.

It is thought to be the longest gap between a crime and a confession in British criminal history.

The victim, who described herself as an “exotic dancer”, was shot in an alleyway outside the nightclub. Reports at the time said she had been warned that her new boyfriend had a revolver.

She was one of a spate of prostitute murders in the year after the end of the Second World War.

Police chased a man aged between 25 and 30, wearing a dark pork pie hat and a Burberry-style raincoat, but he vanished into the crowds.

The Crown Prosecution Service has applied for the Canadian resident - who left Britain five years after the killing - to be extradited to the UK.

However, the Canadian authorities say while the man is mentally fit to stand trial they are undecided whether he is too old to be extradited.