Police investigating threats made on Twitter against the Labour MP Stella Creasy and the writer and campaigner Caroline Criado-Perez have arrested a man in Bristol.
In a statement, Scotland Yard said: "Detectives from the MPS [Metropolitan police service] have this morning, 7 August, arrested a 32-year-old-man, on suspicion of committing an offence under the Protection of Harassment Act, 1997.
"He was arrested at an address in Bristol by officers from the MPS police central e-crime unit as part of an ongoing investigation into allegations relating to threats made on Twitter."
The man, who was taken to a Bristol police station, was arrested in connection with allegations made on 25 and 29 July. He was later bailed to return to a central London police station in late September pending further inquiries.
A Metropolitan police spokeswoman confirmed that the arrest was linked to threats made to Creasy and Criado-Perez on the micro-blogging site.
A number of women in the public eye have been threatened on Twitter in recent weeks, among them the historian Mary Beard and journalists Hadley Freeman, Grace Dent, India Knight and Laurie Penny.
The threats followed Criado-Perez's successful campaign to improve the representation of women on banknotes. After the Bank of England's announcement that the writer Jane Austen would appear on £10 notes from 2017, Criado-Perez and her supporters – including Creasy – found themselves deluged with offensive Twitter messages threatening them with rape and murder.
The man detained on Wednesday morning is the third person to be arrested over the aggressive stream of messages, and comes as Scotland Yard's e-crime unit examines allegations of abuse made by eight people on the site.
Twitter has said it plans to make reporting abuse easier by bringing a "report abuse" function already available on the iPhone app version of the micro-blogging site to other phones and platforms.
More than 120,000 people have signed a petition urging Twitter to implement tighter processes to protect its users.
The site has moved to clarify its rules on abusive behaviour and drafted in extra staff to handle attacks by trolls.
