- Heart experts today said it was "unusual" for
someone to wear electrode pads while walking following revelations that
government scientist David Kelly had four of the special monitors on his
chest when his body was found in an Oxfordshire wood.
-
- Dr Kelly - the BBC's source for a report claiming the
government altered the contents of a dossier about Iraq - had probably
been wearing a 24-hour electro-cardiogram recorder, also known as a Holter
monitor, medical experts said.
-
- But it was odd that the pads that are connected to the
device had not been removed by doctors and were left attached to his chest,
they said.
-
- "If I was in a morgue and his body was presented
to me I would have thought it had come out of a coronary care unit or an
operating theatre," said Professor Konrad Jamrozik, of Imperial College
Hospital London.
-
- "It would be unusual for someone to be walking around
wearing these pads," he told the press association.
-
- Another heart specialist, who declined to be named, also
said it was "very unusual" for someone to be found wearing the
pads.
-
- "It would suggest that at some time he had been
connected to a heart monitor in a hospital or, and this is more likely,
he had been connected to a 24-hour ECG recorder.
-
- "This is a small device which would record any events
in the rhythm and would be returned to a hospital to be analysed."
-
- New details about Dr Kelly's physical condition emerged
today when Lord Hutton opened his inquiry into the circumstances surrounding
the scientist's death.
-
- Lord Hutton read from an account of the postmortem examination
conducted by the pathologist, Nicholas Hunt, the day after Dr Kelly died.
-
- Dr Hunt's report revealed that Dr Kelly had been suffering
from coronary artery disease, which would have hastened rather than caused
his death.
-
- The pathologist believed the main cause of Dr Kelly's
death was bleeding from an incision on his left wrist, Lord Hutton said.
-
- Dr Kelly had also taken off his watch and glasses before
his death in an Oxfordshire wood two weeks ago, it was revealed.
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- "The removal of the watch in this way and the removal
of spectacles are features pointing to this being an act of self-harm,"
the pathologist wrote.
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- To contact the MediaGuardian newsdesk email editor@mediaguardian.co.uk
or phone 020 7239 985
-
- c. 2003 The Guardian
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