Police spent £130,000 and 2,250 hours on the hunt for the "Croydon cat killer" before finding out the pets had probably been hit by cars then mutilated by foxes, new figures reveal.

A dedicated team of four officers worked full-time on the case, trying to find out who had killed and mutilated up to 400 cats, according to data released to BuzzFeed News under a Freedom of Information request. As many as 15 officers were reportedly working on the case at any one time.

The Metropolitan Police also spent £6,000 on cat post-mortems in one year alone during the three-year hunt for the "killer".

It dedicated an estimated 2,250 police hours to the search, named "Operation Takahe" from 2016 to 2018, costing over £130,000.

The force could not give a figure of total money spent on the case as "records that would allow the exact time that officers/members have spent on the investigation are not held."

In September, the Metropolitan Police announced that the case into the killer was closed as officers admitted the deaths can be attributed to vehicles and foxes.

Scotland Yard announced that there was no evidence for human involvement, after a leading veterinarian reviewed six cat autopsies. While initial post-mortems by veterinary pathologists indicated that sharp objects were used to mutilate the corpses of cats which died by blunt force trauma, police concluded this was probably not the case after further investigation.