Читать книгу Conspiracy! 49 Reasons to Doubt, 50 Reasons to Believe - Ian Shircore - Страница 8

As the helicopter slowly clattered its way through the darkness, the crewmen knew what they were looking out for in the fields and woods below them.

Criss-crossing the Oxfordshire night in a tight search pattern, they were looking for a man – or a body.

The UK’s leading chemical and biological warfare expert, Mr Anthrax himself, the top specialist from the secretive Porton Down laboratories, had gone missing. But if he had had an accident – or worse – in the countryside down there, they would find him. The helicopter had modern thermal imaging search and rescue equipment. In skilled hands, that doesn’t miss much.

Dr David Kelly was a former UN weapons inspector in Iraq, a veteran of 37 rounds of that high stakes cat-and-mouse game. He had been accused of leaking information to the BBC that cast doubt on the British government’s reasons for invading Iraq. He knew about the famous ‘sexed-up dossier’ that claimed Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) that could be used at 45 minutes’ notice and he had indicated to BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan that this key claim was simply not true.

As a result, two days earlier, on 15 July 2003, he had been called before Parliament’s Select Committee on Foreign Affairs for a very uncomfortable televised public grilling, followed by a private session with the British intelligence services at a safe house outside London.

Dr Kelly was in the spotlight and under intense scrutiny – as his wife, Janice, said, a ‘distressed’ man.

But that doesn’t mean that he killed himself. When he went out for his usual afternoon walk on nearby Harrowdown Hill, round about three on the afternoon of Thursday, 17 July 2003, nothing seemed out of the ordinary. He had been working in his study all morning – even arranging to fly to Iraq a week later, on 25 July – and had arranged to meet his daughter, Rachel, that evening, so the day was unfolding in a fairly routine way. Curiously, despite the intense media interest, the pressmen who had been doorstepping the house had gone.

It was only when he hadn’t come home much later – after midnight – that Janice Kelly called the police. Recognising that he was a man under pressure, they began a search that included putting up the police helicopter.

According to the search pattern the pilot was flying, it must have been nearly three o’clock in the morning when the helicopter, with its heat-seeking search equipment, flew over the edge of the woods on Harrowdown Hill. The crew saw nothing to report.

Yet, a few hours later, around 9am, volunteer searchers Paul Chapman and Louise Holmes and their dog, Brock, found Dr Kelly’s body, dead but still warm, slumped against a tree at the edge of the wood.

There were cuts on Dr Kelly’s left wrist, apparently made with his blunt and bloody pruning knife that lay, with his wristwatch, on his left side. There was a certain amount of blood, as the deepest of the cuts had severed the small ulnar artery on the little finger side of the wrist, and some vomit around his mouth. There were also three blister packs that had held a total of 30 coproxamol tablets, though there was only one tablet left.

The suspicion, naturally, was that Dr Kelly had given way to the pressure he found himself under and committed suicide.

But there were a number of disturbing factors about this death. They have emerged slowly, over more than eight years, so no one has had all the information at one time until now.

For example, it was not until a Liberal Democrat MP, Norman Baker (later a junior transport minister in Britain’s coalition government), made a Freedom of Information Act request in 2007 that it came out that the bloodied knife found next to Dr Kelly had no fingerprints on it – neither his, nor those of anyone else.

It has since emerged that there were also no prints on the tablet packs. Nor were there any on the blood-smeared bottle of Evian water found by the body. Nor were there any gloves to be found nearby.1

Again, it took another FOI request, by author Garrick Alder in 2008, to flush out the details and times of the unsuccessful helicopter search. The flight record from Bedfordshire and Thames Valley Police forces, which shared the twin-engined Eurocopter, states: ‘Area search included bridlepaths from Longworth north to the River Thames, east to Newbridge and back to Kingston Bagpuize.’

At 2.50am, the Longworth-Thames leg of the search took the helicopter right over Harrowdown Hill, where Dr Kelly was found the next morning. Nothing was spotted down below. Yet the Home Office pathologist, Dr Nicholas Hunt, later told the Hutton Inquiry that Dr Kelly’s death occurred between 4.15pm and the early hours of the morning. The latest time he could have died was 1.15am.

If Dr Kelly was down there on the edge of the wood, recently dead, the helicopter crew would have hoped to find him. If he wasn’t yet there, but was already dead somewhere else, the suicide scenario is obviously wrong.

In 2012, it is clear that Dr Kelly’s death needs to be put under the microscope and investigated thoroughly, if only to end the bubbling suspicion that this ‘suicide’ was actually something far worse.

One reason for scepticism is the fact that there never was a completed inquest into Dr David Kelly’s death – nor a properly constituted public inquiry, under the Public Inquiries Act 1921, which would have done the same job.

The local coroner’s inquest was opened on 21 July 2003, but adjourned and never reopened. The Hutton Inquiry was technically ‘an ad hoc non-statutory judicial inquiry’ set up ‘urgently to conduct an investigation into the circumstances surrounding the death of Dr David Kelly’. At the time, it was widely believed the inquiry would perform the functions of an inquest.

Hutton reported on 28 January 2004, largely exonerating the government and blaming the BBC for its handling of the Kelly/WMD affair. It adopted the conclusion of the pathologist, Dr Hunt, that the cause of death was as recorded on the death certificate ‘1(a) Haemorrhage, 1(b) Incised wounds to the left wrist, and 2 Coproxamol ingestion and coronary artery atherosclerosis’.

This was surprising in itself. The death certificate had been completed and the cause of death registered as ‘haemorrhage’ on 18 August 2003, five weeks before the Hutton Inquiry ended, at a time when Hutton was still taking new evidence to find out what had happened.

Dr Kelly’s death certificate says an inquest took place on 14 August – which is simply untrue – and it has not been signed by a doctor or a coroner, which makes it technically invalid. The Oxfordshire coroner later decided, at a quick 15-minute hearing, not to resume his adjourned inquest.

But Hutton was not a ‘real’ public inquiry with powers to examine the case fully, take evidence under oath and cross-examine witnesses so that it could take the place of a coroner’s inquest. Evidence-taking seemed haphazard. There were 74 witnesses at the Hutton Inquiry but the police officer in charge of the investigation, Chief Inspector Alan Young, wasn’t one of them.

Lord Hutton had never sat as a coroner (and had only led one very minor inquiry before) and the way he dealt with the case didn’t fulfil the basic legal requirements for investigating unnatural deaths. Coroners have to answer five questions about any unusual or unexpected death. These are, broadly:

1) Who died?

2) Where?

3) When?

4) How? (What was the immediate cause of death?)

5) Why? (A verdict is needed, stating by what means the deceased came by his death.)

The Hutton Inquiry didn’t even cover these basics. It didn’t specify where Dr Kelly died and there is certainly room for doubt about how he met his end.

Even the time of death raises some odd questions. Dr Nicholas Hunt, who later carried out the post mortem, first saw the body at the scene at 12.10pm. A key part of his job was to find out when Dr Kelly had died, but he didn’t get round to taking the necessary rectal temperature measurement until 7.15pm, seven hours after first examining the body.

The earlier a temperature reading is taken, the more sure you can be about the time of death. Because of the long delay, the pathologist was only able to say that Dr Kelly had been dead for 18 to 27 hours before the temperature was measured. This meant death had occurred between 4.15pm on the Thursday and 1.15am on the Friday morning.