Читать книгу Conspiracy! 49 Reasons to Doubt, 50 Reasons to Believe - Ian Shircore - Страница 10

Dr David Kelly had become an embarrassment to the Labour government of Tony Blair. He had been a thorn in the side of the Iraqis for many years and had already been warned by the Russians that he was on an Iraqi secret service hit list. He was also, apparently, someone the Chinese secret intelligence service particularly disliked and had placed on a target list.

We know that he freelanced as an adviser for several other intelligence services, including Mossad, the CIA and the FBI, the French and Germans, the Australians and the Japanese, but we have no way of knowing how well or badly these relationships were going. All we can know for sure is that, because of who he was and what he did, there could easily have been some very serious people who were out to get him.

And there are simply too many unusual and unlikely aspects of David Kelly’s death for the outstanding puzzles to be left unresolved. Unless the British authorities and secret service agencies already know the answers, there could still be national security issues at stake, even now. The loose ends still need to be tied up.

For example, though the searchers on Harrowdown Hill said they’d found Dr Kelly’s body slumped against the base of a tree, it then seems to have moved several feet in the course of the next half-hour or so.

One of the two experienced paramedics who were on the scene before 10am was David Bartlett. He recalled the body as being well away from the tree trunk.

‘He was lying flat out some distance from the tree. He definitely wasn’t leaning against it. I remember saying to the copper, “Are you sure he hasn’t fallen out of the tree?”

‘When I was there, the body was far enough away from the tree for someone to get behind it. I know that, because I stood there when we were using the electrodes to check his heart.

‘Later, I learned that the dog team said they had found him propped up against the tree. He wasn’t when we got there. If the earlier witnesses are saying that, then the body has obviously been moved.’

Bartlett and his crew partner, Vanessa Hunt, checked the body over and confirmed that life was extinct at 10.07am. They were both amazed by how little blood they saw around Dr Kelly’s body (see bit.ly/kellyparamedics).

Like Bartlett, Hunt had attended many slashed-wrist suicide attempts over the years. In all cases, there was arterial blood everywhere. But only one of these attempts had succeeded.

‘That was like a slaughterhouse,’ she said. ‘Just think what it would be like with five or six pints of milk splashed everywhere. If you slit your wrists, that is the equivalent amount of blood you would have to lose.’

In the woods on Harrowdown Hill, the picture was strikingly different.

‘There was no gaping wound,’ she said. ‘There wasn’t a puddle of blood around.’

The elements of the Kelly case – political, military, judicial, medical and highly confidential – were always bound to make it controversial. Anything short of maximum transparency was always going to feed conspiracy theories.

But the handling of this explosive mixture was secretive, careless and provocative. Even now, there are completely unexplained questions about the search, the evidence-gathering, the inquiry procedures and the aftermath.

Why, for example, did policemen and three others (assumed to be officers from MI5’s Technical Assessment Unit) come to the house so early on the Friday morning, well before Dr Kelly was known to be dead? Why were Janice Kelly and her daughters asked to go outside and wait in the garden, while the visitors carried out a search so thorough that it included stripping wallpaper off the sitting-room walls?

Why were colleagues of Dr Kelly apparently ‘warned off’ and told not to go to his funeral?

And why didn’t the man in charge of the police investigation, Chief Inspector Alan Young, give evidence at the public inquiry?

Perhaps the oddest fact of this strange case is a detail that has obsessed conspiracy theorists for years. The search for the missing scientist was codenamed Operation Mason by Thames Valley Police. The date-stamped incident file headed ‘Operation Mason’ appears to have been opened at Thames Valley Police HQ at 2.30pm on Thursday, 17 July.

But that was almost ten hours before Dr Kelly was reported missing and some time before he left home to go for his routine afternoon walk.

Just 18 and a half hours later, before a single policeman had set eyes on the body or had a chance to confirm Dr Kelly’s identity, the last entry was made in the file: ‘9.00am. 18.07.03. Body recovered.’

Thames Valley Police representatives have since claimed the Kelly file was only ever intended to cover the period of the incident itself and was timed and dated retrospectively. Sceptics, including Norman Baker MP, have pointed out that the ‘sexed-up dossier’ affair and Dr Kelly’s grilling by parliamentary committees and MoD officials were hardly going to be irrelevant to a possible verdict of suicide. As Baker says, any investigation that took 2.30pm on Thursday, 17 July as its starting point would be ‘woefully inadequate’.

In the face of continuing disquiet about the case, the UK’s Attorney General, Dominic Grieve, announced in August 2011 that there was no good reason to hold an inquest. But this is an issue that attracts the most unlikely conspiracy theorists and a group led by a retired surgeon, Dr David Halpin, was granted a hearing in December 2011 to establish whether there were grounds for Judicial Review of the Attorney General’s ruling. The legal process is likely to be long and expensive, but until the decision is taken to hold a proper coroner’s inquest, the secrets of the Operation Mason file, the missing fingerprints and the catalogue of mysteries surrounding Dr Kelly’s death will continue to feed mistrust and speculation.

1 In the Daily Mail, 20 October 2007: Norman Baker MP wrote: ‘It’s also strange that no mention was made at the Hutton Inquiry of whether there were any fingerprints on the knife. No one volunteered any information on this and no one was asked. ‘After some delay, Thames Valley Police finally told me earlier this year that no fingerprints were recovered from the knife. And yet we know from the evidence of forensic biologist Roy Green that the knife was blood-marked.’ Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article488670/ Click-Part-Two-Norman-Bakers-shocking-investigation. html#ixzz1MVQpSb3q Also the Daily Mail of 5 December 2010: ‘Fresh doubts have been raised over how Dr David Kelly died after police admitted no fingerprints were found on the packs of pills he supposedly overdosed on …. Three blister packs of the painkiller, each able to hold ten pills, were retrieved from Dr Kelly’s coat pocket when his body was found in woods near his home. ‘Only one tablet remained, leading his post mortem examination report to state he may have taken up to 29 pills. ‘Co-proxamol ingestion is listed as a cause of death on his death certificate. ‘But Thames Valley Police has now revealed that when it tested two of the blister packs for fingerprints there were “none recovered”. ‘The development is doubly significant because police have already said the knife which Dr Kelly is said to have used to cut his wrist did not have fingerprints on – nor did an open bottle of water found beside his body. ‘The lack of fingerprints on these items is particularly difficult to explain given that Dr Kelly was not wearing gloves when his body was recovered on 18 July 2003. No gloves were found at the scene.’ Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1335961/Dr-David-Kelly-No-fingerprints-pack-pills-supposedly-overdosed-on. html#ixzz1MVZLZvsL