Anti-rape campaigners voiced alarm yesterday after it emerged Scottish police had dismissed almost 1,000 reported rapes as “no crime.”

Figures revealed on Monday show that some forces gave up on as many as one in three cases of reported rape, despite already-low prosecution rates and promises to make rape a high priority.

Around 41 per cent of crimes against women in the past four years went uninvestigated and in the former Grampian force area, a third of rapes reported were marked “no crime.”