Today’s Mail on Sunday carries one of the most staggering and inexplicable revelations around what is already the strange death of Dr David Kelly, the United Nations Weapons Inspector, in July 2003.
It alleges that Lord Hutton – the ‘safe pair of hands’ who delivered Tony Blair to unearned absolution from blame for the illegal war in Iraq and single handedly ruined the BBC – made an unprecedented and hitherto unknown order.
A year after his enquiry was concluded, Hutton decreed that the medical records of Dr Kelly should be kept as classified secrets for 70 years. His embargo covers the results of the post mortem and other unpublished evidence, the nature of which is unknown.
On Saturday night (23rd January) Lord Hutton could not be contacted by the newspaper and the Ministry of Justice was unable to explain to the Mail on Sunday what the legal basis was for Lord Hutton’s order. Nor is there any explanation for why he made such an order at the stage he did.
David Kelly died in unexplained circumstances on Harrowdown Hill in Oxfordshire, after being named by the Government as the source of BBC journalist Andrew Gilligan’s claim that No 10 had ordered the intelligence assessment of Saddam Hussein’s armoury to be ‘sexed up’.
Hutton’s conclusion that Dr Kelly committed suicide, reached without a prior inquest – which has never been held, has, from the outset been rejected as impossible by medical opinion.
Inexplicable oddities around the scientist’s death include:
- Thames Valley Police opened a report file on the death before Dr Kelly had even left home on the walk that ended in his dying.
- He was said to have died by a mixture of using his right hand to slit the ulnar artery in his left wrist with a blunt penknife; and by taking an overdose of coproxomol.
- A group of medical experts (one of whom is Dr Michael Powers QC, a former Assistant Coroner) – have opposed Lord Hutton’s verdict from the start and are currently bringing a case to challenge his verdict and to force an inquest to be held into Kelly’s death for the first time. Tony Blair’s crony, Lord Falconer, the Lord Chancellor at the time, suspended the inquest before it could begin. He followed up the suspension by using the Coroners Act to regard the Hutton Inquiry as legally ‘fulfilling the function of an inquest’.
- The doctors now taking this legal action state categorically that death by cutting arteries in the wrist is a physical impossibility. They say the Ulnar arter is very small and hard to get at. They say that an instinctive and protective reflex action causes a cut artery to retract almost at once, stopping the outflow of blood. Successful suicides by cutting wrists occur when the person performs the act while in a bath of warm water – the heat keeps the artery open and lets the blood run.
- The same doctors are equally unequivocal in declaring that the very small amount of coproxomol found in Dr Kelly’s blood would come nowhere near a fatal dose and, furthermore, does not correspond with the volume of opened packets of the drug found with his body.
- The small amount of blood on the ground where the body was found is not consistent with a terminal loss.
- A long time professional colleague of Dr Kelly’s in his UN work, Dr Mai Pedersen, who was willing to give evidence to Lord Hutton but was never called upon to do so – has sworn that in the months before his death Dr Kelly was unable to make much use of his right hand because of a long standing injury to his right elbow. Specifically, he was unable to cut steak with it and had to perform this action clumsily with his left hand. This raises a serious query as to how the scientist could have managed to cut an inaccessible in his left wrist with his right hand using a blunt penknife on the day he died.
- Dr Pedersen also claimed that Dr Kelly had a phobic reaction that rendered him unable to swallow pills – not even able to take a pill for migraine when he needed it.
- Walkers who found Dr Kelly’s body and who reported it said that the later official report of its position differed in several crucial ways from what they had found at the time. They found the body propped up against a tree. As they left the scene after reporting what they had found, they met three ‘police’ officers who were then alone at the scene for 20-25 minutes before the arrival of the police officers officially assigned to the case. These officers found the body flat on its back. Medical findings of post mortem lividity indicate that Kelly died on his back, so the evidence of the walkers who ‘found’ his body can only be explained by his having died somewhere else flat on his back and having been moved to the tree trunk in the sitting position – which was how the walkers found it. The implication is that the three ‘police’ officers met by the walkers were already involved somehow in the incident, had realised the mistake they had made in positioning the transported body and were going back to lay the it flat, as they knew the scientist had died in whatever was the original location.
- One of these three ‘police’ officers was identified as Detective Constable Graham Peter Coe. Five witnesses – including two paramedics who arrived, testified that Coe was accompanied by two other officers. In his testimony Coe maintained that he was accompanied by only one other officer. Coe was not questioned about the contradiction.
Remember how white and speechless the normally plausible Tony Blair became when challenged, coincidentally by a Daily Mail reporter, at the time? The journalist was present when Blair arrived at a Press Conference in Hakone, Japan – the forst leg of a Far East tour, as the news broke of the finding of the scientist’s body. With Blair poised on the rostrum, skilfully fielding polite questions on the incident, this reporter broke ranks and called: ‘Mr Blair. Do you have blood on your hands?’
A fellow journalist at the time (Joe Quinn of Signs of the Times) wrote: ‘I watched the BBC main evening news yesterday of Blair’s press conference in Japan on the deatyh of Dr Kelly. Blair fielded a number of questions from reporters on the alleged suicide of the former government arms advisor. He seemed to be handling the situation quite well, but it was obvious that he was completely unprepared for what was to be the final question of the briefing.
‘ “Mr Blair”, the reporter asked, “do you have blood on your hands?” The only way to describe the effect on Blair was that bis face crumpled, it was as though something collapsed inside him. He stood silent and motionless for a few seconds and then abruptly called the session to a close, excusing himself without answering the question. It seemed as if the pressure of lying continually and on such a massive scale, momentarily got a little too much for Tony, and he cracked. Not to worry though, he will surely be patched up and bristling again for his next outing’.
And so he was.
Blair appears before the Chilcot Enquiry on Friday 29th January. Don’t hold your breath. Dr Kelly is unlikely even to be mentioned. It would be discourteous.
Moreover the word is out in the establishment that this is an untouchable. The Mail on Sunday report today quotes Chilcot as saying to a colleague that ‘he did not want to touch the Kelly issue’.
There are many other strangenesses and discrepancies around Dr David Kelly’s death, which googling his name on its own and in conjunction with that of Thames Valley Police will discover.