A British boy who tried to kill himself was saved when a girl he had been chatting with in the US via the internet raised the alarm, starting a trans-Atlantic police hunt.

The boy, 16, had been in contact with a girl in Maryland on the social networking site Facebook when he told her he was about to kill himself.

The girl alerted her mother, who started a string of emergency messages between Maryland police, the White House, the British embassy in Washington, Scotland Yard and Thames Valley Police.