- "On the surface, it seems utterly far-fetched.
But experts, including top doctors, have written to the coroner expressing
doubts over Dr Kelly's 'suicide'. And indeed, there ARE several worrying
inconsistencies in this tragic and mysterious saga."
-
- Items covered in this article:
-
- - Did someone move the body?
- - Who were the three 'detectives'?
- - Why was there so little blood?
- - Who took his dental records?
- - Operation Mason
-
- Medical specialists quoted:
-
- - Dr Andrew Rouse, Public Health Consultant
- - David Halpin, Trauma and Orthopaedic Surgeon
- - Dr Stephen Frost, Diagnostic Radiologist
- - Dr A Peter Fletcher, Fellow of Royal College of Pathologists
- - Professor Simon Kay, Plastic Surgery Consultant
- - Martin Birnstingl, former President of the Vascular
Surgical Society of Great Britain
-
-
- Rowena Thursby
- RowenaThursby@onetel.net.uk
-
-
- Was Dr. Kelly Murdered?
-
- By Sue Reid
- The Daily Mail
- 3-6-4
-
- Lord Hutton was confident he had uncovered the truth.
In Room 76 of the Royal Courts of Justice, he declared that Britain's most
eminent microbiologist, David Kelly, killed himself by slashing his left
wrist with a garden knife after swallowing a batch of painkillers.
The scientist at the heart of the maelstrom over Iraqi weapons of mass
destruction had found the pressure unbearable. Publicly outed for an illicit
conversation with a BBC radio journalist, he was terrified of losing his
job and, at 59, he committed suicide. Lord Butler's conclusions, founded
on countless hours of testimony, are clearly solidly based. Yet there are
a growing number of people who voice grave doubts over whether this is
how Dr Kelly died in an Oxfordshire wood during a summer night last year.
Even before Lord Hutton's historic judgment, Mai Pederson, an American
army intelligence officer and confidante of Dr Kelly, said the scientist
would never have taken his own life.
More intriguingly, she explained that he hated all types of pill. He even
had trouble swallowing a headache tablet.
Admittedly, Pederson is a shadowy figure who declined to present herself
in person to the Hutton Inquiry. Yet her doubts have been endorsed by a
number of respected doctors who say David Kelly cannot have died from blood
loss or painkiller poisoning, certainly on the evidence presented to the
law lord.
A public health consultant at Birmingham University has gone further. Dr
Andrew Rouse told the British Medical Journal's website that a successful
suicide by wrist slashing is so rare that the Office of National Statistics
does not even list such an act separately as a cause of death.
Now these eminent doctors have been joined by others - among them lawyers,
business executives and former intelligence officers - asking for answers
to a series of worrying questions.
The Kelly Group, as this body styles itself, has written to the Oxfordshire
coroner, Nicholas Gardiner, urging that a full inquest into the scientist's
death be held. It was announced this week that Mr Gardiner will decide
on this matter after a special hearing later this month.
'As concerned citizens, including amongst our number a specialist surgeon
and diagnostic radiologist, we have closely scrutinised the testimonies
given at the Hutton Inquiry,' the group wrote to him.
'We consider that neither the police investigation nor the Hutton Inquiry
has demonstrated with any degree of rigour that Dr Kelly took his own life.'
'We contend that the possibility that Dr Kelly's death was murder dressed
up as suicide has not been sufficiently explored. We believe that the death
should be treated as suspicious until a full battery of evidence, including
independently performed forensic evidence, has proved conclusively otherwise.
So is this the conspiracy theory of over-fertile minds? In pursuit of
an answer I painstakingly looked at evidence to the Hutton Inquiry.
I talked to those who insist stones have been left unturned in the quest
for truth. My own inquiries have revealed riddles and inconsistencies that,
undoubtedly, back up the doctors' public unease about how Dr Kelly died.
- But first we must go back to 3.30pm on Thursday, July
17. when the scientist left his home in the village of Southmoor to take
his regular afternoon walk. Nine hours later, at 12.20am, when he had failed
to return home, his wife Janice desperately rang Thames Valley Police to
report her husband missing.
The next morning, at 9.20am, Dr Kelly's body was discovered by a border
collie named Brock on Harrowdown Hill, a mile from the scientist's home.
Brock and his owner, 22-year-old Louise Holmes of the Thames Valley Lowland
Search Team, were assisting the police in their quest to find Kelly.
With another volunteer, Paul Chapman, they had been trawling the woods
for 80 minutes when Brock started barking and ran back to Louise. Unusually,
the trained search dog sat on the ground as if alarmed by something. It
was left to Louise to walk to the spot where Brock had first began to howl.
She told the Hutton Inquiry that she found the body with the head and shoulders
slumped against a tree. Chapman, 15 yards behind, recalled specifically
that Dr Kelly was sitting up. 'His legs were in front of him. His right
arm was to the side of him.
His left arm had a lot of blood on it and was bent back in a funny position,'
said Louise, who stood beside the body for a couple of minutes. Crucially,
neither she nor Chapman, a Scoutmaster, reported seeing much more blood
around the body.
Neither did they mention to the Hutton Inquiry seeing a Sandvig gardening
knife, a discarded and somewhat bloodied watch, even an opened Evian water
bottle, which were all recorded by police and ambulance paramedics when
they arrived half an hour later.
After the grim discovery, Louise rang the police at Abingdon, who promised
to send a team of officers immediately. She and Chapman then began walking
down the path towards their car. It was at this point that they met three
men dressed in civilian clothes who said they were 'Thames Valley detectives',
one of whom showed his identity card. The volunteer searchers directed
the men to the site of the body and went on their way.
From evidence to the Hutton Inquiry and an interview given to a local newspaper
by Louise, it is clear that the time was then 9.30am. What happened next
is a matter of conjecture.
But what we do know is that the three 'detectives' were left alone at the
site for 30 minutes before the uniformed police assigned from Abingdon
arrived at around 10am. Louise Holmes and Paul Chapman say that they found
Dr Kelly's body propped up against a tree. Yet the Abingdon police contingent
insisted to Lord Hutton that they discovered the microbiologist lying flat
on his back. All subsequent witnesses gave the same story.
Not only did the body appear to have been moved, but crucially the pruning
knife, water bottle and watch were suddenly being mentioned by witnesses
at the scene.
At the Hutton Inquiry, Thames Valley detectives said they did not touch
Dr Kelly's body. But the intriguing puzzle does not stop there. Central
to the controversy is the small amount of blood found on, or near, Dr Kelly
and the question of whether he could have died from his knife wounds.
Paramedic Vanessa Hunt, part of an ambulance team which spent around 15
minutes at Dr Kelly's side, told the Hutton Inquiry: 'There was a small
patch on his right knee, but no obvious arterial bleeding. There was no
spraying of blood or huge blood loss or any obvious loss on his clothing.'
It was this key disclosure that has so worried British doctors, including
63-year-old David Halpin, former consultant in trauma at Torbay Hospital,
Devon, and the radiologist Dr Stephen Frost, now based in North Wales.
The doctors contacted the Kelly Group and wrote to a national newspaper.
They said: 'To die from haemorrhage, Dr Kelly would have had to lose about
five pints of blood. It is unlikely from his stated injury that he would
have lost more than a pint.'
Another medical expert and Fellow of the Royal College of Pathologists,
Dr A Peter Fletcher, added in a letter to the press: 'Anybody who has seen
five pints of blood spurted forcefully out of a severed artery will know
that there is one hell of a mess.'
'The two searchers who found the body did not even notice that Kelly had
incised his wrist with a knife.' A fifth medic, Professor Simon Kay, a
plastic surgery consultant at Leeds Teaching Hospital, was even more robust
when he entered the Dr Kelly debate.
He said: 'The popular view that a slit wrist is likely to prove fatal is
far wide of the mark. The natural and protective response of a divided
artery is to constrict and prevent life-threatening haemorrhage.
'Ways around this might include lying in a hot bath... but certainly do
not include lying in a cold field.' There are other tantalising questions.
Why did David Kelly, a world-class scientist, choose to kill himself with
what emerged at the Hutton Inquiry to be a blunt knife? And why did he
choose the ulnar artery, deep inside the wrist, which is hard to get at
and extremely unlikely to lead to death?
Martin Birnstingl, one of the country's most respected vascular surgeons,
insists it would be virtually impossible for Dr Kelly to die by severing
the ulnar artery on the little finger side of his inner wrist. Mr Birnstingl
was until recently President of the Vascular Surgical Society of Great
Britain and is a former consultant at Barts Hospital, London.
He told the Mail: 'I have never, in my experience, heard of a case where
someone has died after cutting their ulnar artery. And I have seen plenty
of suicides.
'The minute the blood pressure falls, after a few minutes, this artery
would stop bleeding. It would spray blood about and make a mess but it
would soon cease. 'Kelly was in the know. He was a scientist. People normally
try to slash the radial artery in their wrist, the one which is used to
take a pulse. Or if they are really intent on death, they cut the artery
in their groin.'
At the very least, it was an extraordinarily painful and uncertain suicide
method for the former head of microbiology at the research establishment
of Porton Down; a man who was a world authority on toxic substances.
Equally intriguingly, it would have been almost impossible for the right-handed
Dr Kelly to have slashed from left to right on his opposite wrist, missing
the superficial pulse-taking artery and cutting deep into the ulnar artery.
There is also the matter of the three packs of the painkiller Co-Proxamol
found in Dr Kelly's coat pocket. They are believed to have been taken by
him from his arthritic wife's medical cabinet, although this was never
confirmed at the Hutton Inquiry.
And Dr Kelly's own doctor said he had never prescribed him Co-Proxamol.
When Dr Kelly's body was found, all but one of the 30 tablets were missing.
Could these 29 tablets on their own have been responsible for ending his
life?
According to the Hutton Inquiry, they did not. Only a fifth of a tablet
was later found, during an autopsy, in Dr Kelly's stomach.
Moreover, the blood reading of each of the drug's two components was less
than a third of what would normally be found in a fatal over- dose victim.
What then of the scientist's mental state? As Dr Kelly set out on that
last walk, it was clear that he was deeply unhappy. Although Lord Hutton
said he was not suffering from any mental problems, the future must have
appeared gloomy.
A letter from the Ministry of Defence, found unopened on Dr Kelly's desk,
spoke of a possible disciplinary hearing.
Undoubtedly, he would have been told of its unpleasant contents before
its arrival at his home in the days before his death. What must have been
going on in Dr Kelly's head?
His hopes of returning to his beloved Iraq were disappearing fast. Ironically,
he had as many enemies there - where he challenged Iraqi scientists with
formidable zeal over their weapons' programmes - as he did in Britain.
When Dr Kelly interrogated one British-trained Iraqi woman scientist at
the centre of Saddam Hussein's chemical warfare efforts, his questioning
was so tough that she ran screaming from the room. In Iraq, he was perceived
as a tough opponent.
Dr Kelly had himself predicted in jest in only February 2003 that if Iraq
was attacked, he might be found 'dead in the woods'.
Meanwhile, in Whitehall he was being viewed as a somewhat troublesome employee;
perhaps a liability in the world of defence intelligence in which he moved.
Dr Kelly was not prepared to cut his media links or be permanently silenced.
Was he now viewed as a security risk?
Had his extraordinary and unorthodox friendship with the Egyptian-American
Mai Pederson - one that was barely tolerated by the Ministry of Defence
- begun to count against him?
Controversially, he had been discussing book projects with Victoria Roddam,
an Oxford publisher who, in an e-mail to the scientist only a week before
his death, wrote: 'I think the time is ripe now more than ever for a title
which addresses the relationship between Government policy and war - I'm
sure you would agree?' She seemed to expect a positive response.
There were other puzzles, too. Immediately the news of his suicide broke,
Dr Kelly's dental records were discovered to be missing from his personal
file at the local surgery.
His woman dentist, according to the Hutton Inquiry, reported the mystery
to police after finding an unlocked window at the surgery.
Yet - mysteriously - two days later the records reappeared back at the
surgery in Dr Kelly's buff file. Their temporary disappearance so concerned
the police that a DNA test was run on Dr Kelly's body to ensure it was
really him.
Among the bundles of evidence submitted to the Hutton Inquiry is also an
intriguing secret document marked: 'Not for Release. Police Information
Only'
The document, according to an audit of evidence in the public domain, records
a tactical support operation by Thames Valley Police during what it terms
a 'major incident' on July 17 and July 18 of last year when Dr Kelly was
missing. It was called Operation Mason.
Thames Valley Police has told the Daily Mail that the Operation Mason file
details their investigation into the circumstances surrounding Dr Kelly's
death.
The audit shows that Operation Mason ended at 9.30am on July 18 as the
two searchers with the dog Brock walked away from Dr Kelly's body to meet,
by chance, the three detectives.
But more extraordinary was the time Operation Mason is said to have started:
at 2.30pm on July 17. Bizarrely, that is exactly one hour before Dr Kelly
set out on his final walk. And nearly ten hours before his distressed wife
rang the police to sound the alert over her missing husband.
The contents of the Mason file remain strictly confidential.
-
-
- Scanned from today's Daily Mail
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- <mailto:RowenaThursby@onetel.net.uk>RowenaThursby@onetel.net.uk
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