I'm with you Ivan. It's all just too unlikely. There are no pics as you say, not even of tracks. No farmers complaining about loss of livestock (big cat hunts would soon ensue not to mention the front page of the Daily Mail). Maybe a few were released a long time ago but there certainly could be no breeding population. Most land in Britain is too heavily used for no-one to have found any concrete evidence beyond the odd story about vanishing hind quarters with a longer than usual tail attached. Eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable, even if the testimony does come from the big man himself 
