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THE Scottish Office has commissioned a £ 25,000 study to try to find out why people living north of the Border are almost twice as likely to meet a violent death as their English and Welsh counterparts.

The latest Government figures show a startling gap between the countries' homicide rates, with Strathclyde topping the table as the killers' capital of Britain, closely followed by Central region.

The average number of homicides in Scotland - including murders and culpable homicides - comes out at 23.4 per million people, compared to an average of 13 in England and Wales, where the comparable charges are murder and manslaughter.

The six-month study commissioned by the Scottish Office will try to establish the reasons for the long-standing discrepancy.

Professor Keith Soothill, a criminologist at Lancaster University who began the research last week with a statistician Brian Francis, said yesterday he hoped to determine where social phenomena such as poverty and drink were to blame, and how much was due to differences in the way data was collected.

"There are massive gaps which you wouldn't expect from countries that are so close together," said Prof Soothill, who was last night unwilling to pre-empt his research by offering any personal theories.