Dr David Kelly was murdered
…or so say the six doctors who have started legal action for a new inquest into his death. I’ll let the Telegraph do the rest:
The action is being taken because six doctors are convinced that the original verdict of suicide is unsafe and should be overturned. Some suspect that Dr Kelly, 59, was murdered shortly after it was revealed that he was the source of a BBC story which alleged that evidence against Iraq had been “sexed up” by the Government in order to justify the 2003 invasion.
The body of Dr Kelly, who was a UN weapons inspector, was found more than six years ago in woods near his Oxfordshire home after he went out for a walk. His wrist had been slashed. He also had painkillers in his bloodstream, although not at a lethal level. At the time of his death, Dr Kelly was under pressure because it had emerged that he had provided confidential information for the BBC story. However, in a 13-page dossier prepared as the basis for the legal action, the doctors argue that the bleeding from Dr Kelly’s ulnar artery in his left wrist is “highly unlikely” to have caused his death. They say a number of studies have shown that it is unusual for a patient to die from a single deep cut to the wrist.
The revelation of the move for a new inquest is embarrassing for the Government, particularly as it comes just two weeks into the inquiry chaired by Sir John Chilcot which is examining Britain’s role in the invasion of Iraq and its aftermath. The doctors are applying to the Attorney General, Baroness Scotland for permission to go to the High Court for a new inquest, or the resumption of the previous inquest.
Their case rests on section 13 of the 1988 Coroners Act, which allows the High Court to order a new inquest, or to resume a previous inquest, in “special cases”, including cases where “it is necessary or desirable in the interests of justice”. Unusually, no coroner’s inquest was ever held into Dr Kelly’s death. Instead, the official verdict of suicide was provided by the Hutton Inquiry, commissioned by Tony Blair, the then-Prime Minister. Nicholas Gardiner, the Oxfordshire coroner, initially opened the inquest but it was Lord Falconer, then the Lord Chancellor, who ruled that Lord Hutton’s inquiry would fulfil “the function of an inquest”. It concluded that Dr Kelly died from a loss of blood after cutting his wrist with a blunt gardening knife, having earlier taken a cocktail of painkillers.
Dr Kelly had been one of the few to examine, prior to its publication, the Government dossier that declared that Saddam Hussein had Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) which could strike Britain in 45 minutes. The claim was used by Mr Blair in 2002 as a central justification for a war against Iraq. The Government was incensed when Dr Kelly emerged as the source for the BBC’s story. He was forced to appear before television cameras giving evidence to a House of Commons committee. Later he was taken away to be interviewed by the British intelligence services in a safe-house. In a telephone call shortly before his death, Dr Kelly said he would not be surprised “if my body was found in the woods”.
The doctors say the Hutton inquiry was “totally inadequate” as a means of identifying the cause of Dr Kelly’s death and they are seeking to obtain Dr Kelly’s autopsy report. Their main argument is that the bleeding from Dr Kelly’s ulnar artery in his left wrist is “highly unlikely” to have caused his death. They say a number of studies have shown that it is unusual for a patient to die from a single deep cut to the wrist. They say the Hutton Inquiry lacked the powers of a full inquest because it did not hear evidence taken under oath, it did not have the power to subpoena witnesses and it did not have the power to summon a jury. They also say that the proviso which enabled the Hutton Inquiry to replace an inquest has only previously been used for mass deaths, such as the Ladbroke Grove rail crash or the inquiry in the deaths of patients the hands of Dr Harold Shipman.
Many Government critics, including Norman Baker, the campaigning Liberal Democrat MP, have claimed that Dr Kelly was murdered. A film, Anthrax War, alleged that Dr Kelly, who was the head of biological defence at Porton Down, the Government’s secret military research establishment in Wiltshire, “knew too much”. The film claims he may have been murdered because of his links to the West’s secret germ warfare programme. Dr Stephen Frost, one of the six doctors, who has spend six years studying the case, said: “We are determined to get to the bottom of this death. We will pursue it to the very end.” Dr Michael Powers QC, a medical lawyer and another of the six experts to put their names to the 13-page dossier, has said that the evidence for Dr Kelly’s suicide is “very thin”. The other four signatories include consultants and experts united by a sense of concern over the lack of a full inquest: Martin Birnstingl, Dr Christopher Burns-Cox, David Halpin, and Dr Andrew Rouse.
At the time Dr Kelly’s body was found on July 17 2003, an unopened letter marked “personal” lay on the desk of his study. It threatened him with the sack if he ever repeated his indiscretion and spoke publicly – or briefed journalists – about his work. Government sources dismiss suggestions that Dr Kelly was murdered and they are convinced the Hutton Inquiry’s verdict remains safe. His family has also supported the findings of the Hutton Inquiry and does not believe that a new inquest is necessary.
On a personal note, I never for one second believed that Dr Kelly killed himself. It was just too convenient, too absurd for a man to slit his wrists while walking his dog, too crooked and shadowy an investigation (if you can even call it that) into his death. Yes, many conspiracy theorists and conspiracy theories are nut jobs, but sometimes something just feels wrong, you know?
Witanagemot Blogs
As far as I am aware,the West does not have a “secret” germ warfare program. The USA has never signed the protocol covering germ warfare, reserving the right to produce such weapons if there is a likelihood of use by an enemy. Research into the use of biological and chemical weapons is carried out discretely but the existence of the program is common knowledge.
the above does not, of course, include the actions of the Notional Health Service, which has admitted to the death of over 30,000 “patients” from HAI, for which they are very sorry, but is due to circumstances outside their control.
I hope they also manage to “nail” Alastair Campbell over this as well.
The whole enquiry into Dr Kelly’s death was just another Labour Government WHITEWASH.
Dunno about the West per se, Grumpy, but the UK definately did (does?) CB research on the quiet.
You may remember the secret tests at Porton down using LSD and laterly, nerve agent, on soldiers who believed they were taking part in a ‘flu’ trial. The fuss about trying to find out about tests that took place 30 or 40 years ago?
Or what about the release in the 60s of ‘inert’ biological agents on the London Underground to track the contaminants around the system in preparation for a Soviet attack? Maybe that doesn’t count…
And these are the incidents we know about! Off the top of my head! On a hungover Sunday morning!
The bottom line, however, is that Kelly’s death remains suspicious. He gained less from his ’suicide’ than others so the ‘cui bono’ question remains, in my view, fairly valid!
Calling Mr Campbell to Court Number One!
You’ll need to study very carefully how many microbiologists who worked for the Israeli secret “genetic WMD” project are now dead.
1. Nov. 12, 2001: Benito Que was said to have been beaten in a Miami parking lot and died later.
2. Nov. 16, 2001: Don C. Wiley went missing. Was found Dec. 20. Investigators said he got dizzy on a Memphis bridge and fell to his death in a river.
3. Nov. 21, 2001: Vladimir Pasechnik, former high-level Russian microbiologist who defected in 1989 to the U.K. apparently died from a stroke.
4. Dec. 10, 2001: Robert M. Schwartz was stabbed to death in Leesberg, Va. Three Satanists have been arrested.
5. Dec. 14, 2001: Nguyen Van Set died in an airlock filled with nitrogen in his lab in Geelong, Australia.
6. Feb. 9, 2002: Victor Korshunov had his head bashed in near his home in Moscow.
7. Feb. 14, 2002: Ian Langford was found partially naked and wedged under a chair in Norwich, England.
8. & 9. Feb. 28, 2002: San Francisco resident Tanya Holzmayer was killed by a microbiologist colleague, Guyang Huang, who shot her as she took delivery of a pizza and then apparently shot himself.
10. March 24, 2002: David Wynn-Williams died in a road accident near his home in Cambridge, England.
11. March 25, 2002: Steven Mostow of the Colorado Health Sciences Centre, killed in a plane he was flying near Denver.
October 4, 2001: A commercial jetliner (not a charter as initially reported), Air Sibir #1812, traveling from Israel to Novosibirsk, Siberia is shot down over the Black Sea by an ‘errant’ Ukrainian surface-to-air missile. The missile is over 100 miles off-course. All on board are killed.
According to press reports, the plane had as many as five microbiologists- involved in classified research- on board. Both Israel and Novosibirsk are homes for cutting-edge microbiological research. Novosibirsk is known as the scientific capital of Siberia, home to over 50 research facilities and 13 accredited universities- among a population of only 2.5 million people.
The Israeli intelligence agency Mossad rushes to the site; the names of the dead scientists are blocked from release.
At least one of the six doctors is a 9/11 and 7/7 truther, I wouldn’t be surprised if the other five are also inclined towards conspiracy theories.
I love the smell of a conspiracy theory in the morning. I’d love to know whether it’s true.
I’ve always thought Dr Kelly was murdered. His death, in such strange circumstances, was just TOO convenient. The question is – who did it, and on behalf of whom.
If an Inquest is held and the cause of death is found not to be suicide, there will be pressure for the police to investigate. For that reason, I predict that Baroness Scotland (on behalf of her Masters) will NOT permit an Inquest to take place. The finger might start to point in directions they don’t want.
If it is true or false,anything that gives “Lord Falconer”sleepless nights is OK by me.
Unfortunately, the base of this whole affair goes back to Israel researching the “Jewish Gene” in order to develop a weapon that could wipe out non Jews.
And that is a VERY hot potato that no one wants to handle. Can’t think why.
http://dr-david-kelly.blogspot.com/2007/01/gordon-thomas-is-successful-author.html
@Boudicca –
Ah the Baroness Scotland!
That paragon of British Society and upholder of the Law of the Land.
Or as she’s better known – that crooked Labour Peer who brings shame upon our legal system.
Well said Boudicca.
I’m not a medical expert but the conclusions reached by Hutton seemed to me to fly in the face of what I know about anatomy and suicide.
Hutton wrote:
‘I am satisfied that none of the persons whose decisions and actions I later describe ever contemplated that Kelly might take his own life. I am further satisfied that none of those persons was at fault in not contemplating that Kelly might take his own life. Whatever pressures and strains Kelly was subjected to by the decisions and actions taken in the weeks before his death, I am satisfied that no one realised or should have realised that those pressures and strains might drive him to take his own life or contribute to his decision to do so.’
Even if, (and I think it unlikely that he did), take his own life, this statement from Hutton is perfectly formulated to deliver the government and the MOD the cover whch they required.
Now either the government were entirely blameless after priming Andrew MacKinlay to ambush Dr Kelly in public, after government sources had exposed him as the sole source of the Gilligan story (another half truth at best), or the government chose the right man to supply them the outcome they needed.
I can’t claim to know what happened to Dr Kelly, but I am deeply suspicious of the the Hutton enquiry and it’s results. It was a whitewash. If the government have nothing to hide, they have nothing to fear, isn’t that what they always tell us?
Gordon Brown: Hold a proper inquest now, or do you have something to hide?
Good to get some sort of confirmation of this.
Now these comments make me feel like a denier.
The basic premise is that the Kelly death is inconsistent with suicide.
But what about motive? Why would a government, desperate to avoid talk about DR K, and ‘move on’ turn an already difficult media circus spin into a frenzied pack?
What could the government possibly gain by killing Kelly that it couldn’t achieve by rubbishing him , as it was already doing.
The motive isn’t there.
Its as false and illogical as the whole Bush blew up the towers to take America into Iraq by way of a war in Afghanistan. It makes no sense to do such a stupid thing in such a stupid way.
The most likely explanation for Dr Kelly’s death is the one given.
How he died is almost irrelevant. Its ‘why’ he died that is important.
Silence.
Three can keep a secret, as the saying goes, if two of them are dead.
If the motive were to ensure that following his patsying, Kelly remained silent (when his loyalty to HMG may have been, sto say the least, a tad strained), then death was clearly the most succinct way of achieving that. Even if you discredited him or got him to discredit himself, some people would still listen to him (c.f. David Shayler). And even top scientists can’t speak from beyond the grave.
You don’t need to subscribe to Old Holborn’s theory (which I do, btw, as when I was at uni in the early 90s I knew bio-chemists who were expressly interested in ethnocentric weapons and namechecked both SA and Israel as big players) to see that if there were to be such a thing as ‘knowledge to dangerous to permit’ then someone like Kelly, or indeed Kelly, may well have been party to it.
You don’t need to subscribe to Old Holborn’s theory (which I do, btw, as when I was at uni in the early 90s I knew bio-chemists who were expressly interested in ethnocentric weapons and namechecked both SA and Israel as big players) to see that if there were to be such a thing as ‘knowledge to dangerous to permit’ then someone like Kelly, or indeed Kelly, may well have been party to it.
But the government was not involved in stories about nerve gas, It was involved in a story about a scientist who said there were no weapons of mass destruction capable of being fired in 45 minutes.
If the government killed Kelly then it prolonged a story at exactly the moment they wanted it to go away.
‘Do you have blood on your hands Prime Minister?’
The government was rocked by this barrage of negative press.
Now they were accused of murder and cover-up instead of just cover-up.
Yes Bill, but the problem is that these people are proven, demonstrable idiots and this move could only be made by grade-A Panicky F*ckwits ™ which certainly means that it’s not beyond their proven f*ckwittery threshold of ineptitude.
People always endow conspiracies with super human intelligence. Don’t. Look at *actual* conspiracies and see how often only blind luck stopped massive secrets coming out about a project that shaped the world such as the Manhattan Project. Those involved in the death of a scientist (or five) shouldn’t be presumed any smarter or more competent, should they?
I don’t think Kelly was murdered by MI5 or the UK Government. But murdered he was.
Anyone will that level of knowledge of the South African germ warfare experiments and the Israeli Gene Bomb is hardly likely to have a long and happy retirement, are they?
During the Hutton inquiry, a British ambassador called David Broucher reported a conversation with Kelly at a Geneva meeting in February 2003. Broucher related that Kelly said he had assured his Iraqi sources that there would be no war if they co-operated, and that a war would put him in an “ambiguous” moral position.[6] Broucher had asked Kelly what would happen if Iraq were invaded, and Kelly had replied, “I will probably be found dead in the woods.” Broucher then quoted from an email he had sent just after Kelly’s death: “I did not think much of this at the time, taking it to be a hint that the Iraqis might try to take revenge against him, something that did not seem at all fanciful then. I now see that he may have been thinking on rather different lines.”
I suspect he was murdered too and, an almost evil streak makes me agree with one or two others in hoping Campbell gets his comeuppance.
Funnily enough I’ve always had this wierd suspicion that he may have had something to do with Jill dando’s murder too. He certainly looked like the photofit and I believe he was questioned by the police too. She was just about to be married and maybe had mentioned to ex lovers that she was going to tell her husband…maybe…
Anyway, there’s someone at the door and I have to take the dog for a walk in the woods…
@Bill Quango MP –
Dear Mr Quango MP
On the subject of motive, I refer my Right Honourable friend to the transcript of the interview of Mr Michael Shrimpton QC and Alex Jones. Mr. Shrimpton seems to be quite clear on this matter.
(comment deleted for breaking the rules of this blog)
Dear all (who have previously discussed this here),
I’m incredulous. Really I am. And LFAT, whom I dearly love and read daily, I would have expected more from your august, eloquent mind.
Two comments:
1. Honestly, in your heart of hearts, retaining all your intellectual objectivity, do you really think that any British Government or agent thereof, in the 21st century, would actually murder a British subject on British soil, in the full gaze of the 24/7 publicity of without question the largest Government crisis so far this century? I mean. Really?
2. For the record, the Duke of Edinburgh did not have M15 murder the Princess of Wales, the Americans really did land on the moon, JFK was in fact murdered by a lone gunman, and Elvis is not living on the moon in a London bus with the hamster that Freddie Star didn’t eat.
Melvin
Melvin Darling
Try Mossad. They do what they bloody well like. Whenever. Wherever.
Indeed.
Extraordinary rendition didn’t just pop magically into existence you know. Oh no.
It had historical precedent.
Dear Old Holbie and Shaun P,
Read my comment again. Carefully this time. I was talking very explicitly about our British Government.
Israeli agents have wandered around the world killing opponents for decades. Everyone knows that. It’s well documented.
And the US Government in recent times (particularly during the Bush years) has moved way off the moral high ground (Guantanamo and extraordinary rendition etc).
But if you really think that the British Government or agents thereof run around killing people you are either mad, an hysterical conspiracy theorist or have been reading way too much James Bond.
In a previous life I was a soldier and, trust me, the red tape involved to shoot someone who is on the opposing side in a declared conflict and actually shooting at you at the time is a wonder to behold. The idea that British officialdom could shortcut its red tape to expedite this process is unimaginable!
Melvin
[...] Kelly was murdered ? Dr David Kelly was murdered Sunday 6th December, [...]