Bereaved families said they felt insulted after British prosecutors told them Kenneth Law would not be pursued in the UK, one day before the 60-year-old was due to appear in court in Ontario, Canada. The decision means the Canadian case is now expected to be the only criminal process for a man accused of selling suicide packages to people in dozens of countries.

Law is expected to plead guilty to aiding suicide and to admit sending products internationally knowing they were likely to be used to end lives. Last month, his lawyers confirmed a plea agreement under which previous murder charges would be withdrawn.

The National Crime Agency investigation found that 286 people in the UK had received packages linked to Law, with 112 deaths in Britain tied to them. Law was accused of selling 1,200 suicide packages across 40 countries, including the UK, and families have spent months pressing for a prosecution closer to home.

A day before the court appearance in Ontario, the National Crime Agency and the Crown Prosecution Service told bereaved families they would not seek to extradite Law to the UK after legal proceedings in Canada had concluded. They said they had agreed that he should be sentenced for the full extent of his offending within a single sentencing process in Canada, and said that approach was not unusual in serious cases that cross international borders.

That explanation has done little to calm the anger. Bereaved relatives say the case is being treated as a legal problem when, to them, it is a series of deaths that left families without answers in their own country. Adele Zeynep Walton said it was “absolutely insane” that the NCA and CPS were not going to do anything about it, calling the decision “so insulting”. She said the scale of the case showed authorities needed to adapt to “a new epidemic of assisted suicide” driven online.

David Parfett said he was angry but not surprised, arguing that families had been told for months that the system was working and existing measures were enough, when they were not. He said that if the UK would not put anyone on trial for the deaths, then it should at least hold a proper inquiry into how they were allowed to happen. Andy Burrows said families had campaigned tirelessly to hold Law to account in the UK and described the decision, made on the eve of the Canadian hearing, as “a bitter blow”.

The wider conflict is now plain. British authorities say one Canadian sentencing process should cover the full scale of the alleged offending. Families say that leaves the UK deaths without a public reckoning in the country where many of the victims lived, and where the consequences were felt most sharply. The government rejected calls for a public inquiry last month, leaving campaigners with fewer routes to force a broader examination of what went wrong.

Law’s case has already drawn in families whose losses became part of a wider pattern. Aimee died in 2022 after buying one of the suicide kits from his website, and Thomas Parfett, 22, took his own life in Sunbury-on-Thames, Surrey, that same year. For those relatives, the latest decision is not a procedural step. It is the latest sign that the justice they have pursued for years will be delivered, if at all, far from home.