More like this
David Kelly ‘was too weak to have killed himself’
New claims cast doubt on the official account of whistleblower's death
A friend of former weapons inspector Dr David Kelly, said to have committed suicide in 2003, has cast doubt on the official explanation of his death and called for an independent review of the case.
US Air Force officer Mai Pedersen, who worked with Dr Kelly in Iraq in the 1990s, claims that the 59-year-old could not have killed himself as he was too weak to cut his own wrists and would have struggled to swallow 29 painkillers.
She has written to Attorney General Dominic Grieve after he admitted that he was "concerned" about the case and was considering revisiting the issue.
Dr Kelly (above) was found dead in woodland near his home in Oxfordshire in 2003 after he was exposed as the source of a BBC report that questioned the government's case for war in Iraq. He was forced to appear before two House of Commons committees where he was cross examined about what he had told BBC journalist Andrew Gilligan.
There has always been an air of mystery around the circumstances of his death and no inquest was ever completed. The day before his death he said in an email to a friend that there were "many dark actors playing games". But in 2008 the Hutton Inquiry into the events surrounding Dr Kelly's death ruled that he had killed himself by swallowing 29 painkillers and slitting his left wrist. Its findings were rejected by many.
Now Pedersen claims that Kelly would have been too weak to slit his wrist as an arm injury meant he even "had difficulty cutting his own steak". She also says that the 59-year-old had difficulty swallowing pills.
The Daily Mail says that in her letter to Grieve she wrote: "Given the absence of any coroner's inquest and the perpetual secrecy surrounding the post-mortem examination, it is painfully obvious that this matter continues to cry out for a formal, independent and complete review."
Although Grieve cannot order a public inquiry, he can apply for an inquest if there is evidence to support it. ·
Comments are now closed on this article
Comments
Well I see plenty of people querying this (here's five in the comments, plus the author).
Then there's Lord Hutton's (yes, him) 80 year embargo of any and all papers relating to this affair, thus blocking the group of doctors who had no confidence in the autopsy result and brought a private case seeking to reopen the inquest.
Fair play to the post for continuing to beat the drum, but the question is, when is anyone actually going to DO anything about the strong suspicion of high-level corruption and murder in the Kelly case?
There are always in life things which just don't add up. Blaming Barry George for the professional style murder of Jill Dando was such a glaring example. Eventually the conviction was declared "unsafe" or some other weasel word establishment euphermism. The "sucicide" of David Kelly is another example of the elephant in the room. It's very unlikely we will ever get the truth of this out in the open but clues will emerge and we can make our own minds up. Oh and of course if Barry George didn't do it, then who did? It seems the Met have stopped looking now that the public's gaze has been distracted by other spectacles.
One doesn't have to look far for those who killed Kelly; he was being shadowed by MoD secret police. He said himself there were 'many dark actors playing games', they were lethal games. It remains to speculation whether Blair actually ordered his murder, or whether it was a case of 'Will nobody rid me of this troublesome weopons inspector'... the whole thing stinks, not least the UK media's abject disinterest in querying what was a far too convenient death.
Why would a timid and frail senior civil sevant in his last year or so of his career either tell lies or commit suicide? Saying that there was no scientific evidence to support the "weapons of mass destruction in Iraq" thesis when establishments both sides of the Atlantic were declaring that it was their justification for the invasion was clearly a brave move. The Kelly report is sufficient evidence to impeach Mr. Blair for the wrongful invasion of of Iraq. Let us hope that Dr. Kelly's courage and death were not in vain.
Perhaps people have been barking up the wrong tree for culprits, if there are any. Could agents of a foreign power be involved - not necessarily one usually considered an enemy? Given his undercover and still largely unrevealed involvements Kelly knew an awful lot more than he ever disclosed in his single indiscretion, and therefore remained a potential source of dangerous future leaks.