As any viewer of TV crime will know, most solved cases are so because of the work of the forensics people, but in this case there was surprisingly little forensic evidence forthcoming. For instance, whose fingerprints were on the knife? Was any foreign DNA detected in the blood samples? Was the watch found beside Dr Kelly broken or intact, and, if broken, what time did it show? What were the last calls made to him on his mobile phone? None of these questions was asked during the inquiry, and no answers were volunteered.
In March 2005, Lib Dem MP Norman Baker resigned his front bench job expressly to investigate the circumstances surrounding Kelly’s death. A year later he published his findings on his own website and contributed to a BBC TV programme,
Baker questions why the Lord Chancellor, Lord Falconer, decided the inquiry should not be held under the usual rules, so that witnesses could not be subpoenaed, nor did they have to give evidence under oath, making the whole procedure less rigorous than a standard coroner inquest. Even more bizarrely, the Oxfordshire coroner, Nicholas Gardiner, pre-empted the findings of the inquiry by issuing a full death certificate on 18 August, while Hutton’s investigation was still in its early stages, in spite of rules stating that at most only an interim certificate should be issued while an inquest is in adjournment. Baker doesn’t think much of the appointed pathologist either, describing the medical evidence presented by him to the inquiry as “incomplete, inconsistent and inadequate”.
As for the conduct of the police force, the most puzzling fact that has come to light has been that Operation Mason, as it was named, began at 2.30 p.m. on 17 July, about nine hours before Dr Kelly’s family reported him missing and half an hour before he left his home to go for his walk. Quite how the police knew what was going to happen, they are not willing to divulge. Nor are they willing to say why they felt it necessary to erect a 45-foot-high (15.7m) antenna in the Kellys’ garden, or turn Mrs Kelly out of her home in the middle of the night for some considerable time while a search dog was put through the house. According to Baker, one of the most senior police officers in the country, on being consulted, was at a loss as to why either action would have been required.
Norman Baker reserves particular scepticism for the choice of Lord Hutton to head the inquiry and the part Tony Blair played in the decision. In spite of being on a jet somewhere between Washington and Tokyo when formally advised of Dr Kelly’s death, Blair decided on an inquiry and appointed Lord Brian Hutton as its head even before the journey was over. Parliament, perhaps rather conveniently, had adjourned for the summer, and the appointment was made on the advice of Lord Falconer and, Baker suspects, Peter Mandelson. The man they chose had no experience of chairing any other public inquiry but, during his distinguished career, plenty of history of upholding the views of the government of the day.
It was highly unlikely, therefore, that the Hutton Inquiry was going to answer such sticky questions as why a highly respected scientist chose to take his life in quite such an unconventional way, days after being embroiled in a political scandal that was potentially deeply damaging to the government. Kelly had been deeply upset by being thrust into the media spotlight and, no doubt, bewildered by the the MoD’s decision to leak his name to the press. However, he was also cheerful and joky with members of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee the day before his death, and had made plans to fly to Iraq the following week; one of his daughters was looking forward to her impending wedding day. Most importantly, perhaps, he was a practising member of the Baha’i faith, which forbids the act of suicide.
An email to a New York journalist, Judith Miller, on the morning of 17 July suggests that Dr Kelly realized that there was something worrying going on behind the soundbites and political posturing:
David, I heard from another member of your fan club that things went well for you today. Hope it’s true.
(Original message sent by Judith Miller, 16 July 00.30)
I will wait until the end of the week before judging—many dark actors playing games. Thanks for your support. I appreciate your friendship at this time.
(Dr Kelly’s reply, sent 17 July 11.18)
Conspiracy theorists believe Kelly had been labelled a loose cannon and as such a threat to the stability of the government. If Britain lost Blair, Europe lost an important ally in its struggle for greater political and economic union. Michael Shrimpton, a barrister and intelligence services expert who also acted for the Kelly Investigation Group, claimed he was told Kelly had been assassinated. Speaking in an interview with Canadian broadcaster Alex Jones in 2004 he said: “Within 48 hours of the murder I was contacted by a British Intelligence officer who told me [Kelly had] been murdered… now that source told me he’d done some digging and discovered that, he didn’t name names, but he discovered that it had been known in Whitehall prior to 17 July that David Kelly was going to be taken down.”
Shrimpton went on to explain that clever governments get the secret services of their allies to do their dirty work for them, and that Kelly’s death bore all the hallmarks of a job by the DGSE (Direction Generale de la Securite Exterieure), the French equivalent of MI6. The tablets found in Kelly’s pocket would have been a cover; he would actually have been killed by a lethal injection of dextropropoxythene, the active ingredient of co-proxamol, and the muscle relaxant succinylcholine, “a favourite method” of murder by intelligence services, with his wrist clumsily cut to disguise the needle’s puncture mark. Shrimpton said the assassination team would most likely have been recruited from Iraqis living in Damascus, to disguise French involvement, and then its members killed after the event to ensure absolute secrecy.
There are others, such as UN weapons inspector Richard Spertzel, who claim it was the Iraqis themselves who killed Dr Kelly in revenge for all the trouble he’d brought upon Saddam Hussein’s regime through his work. This seems far-fetched. Although Kelly had said he supported the invasion of Iraq, he had not been the author of the 45-minute claim which had precipitated military action. And he had only recently inspected trailers, claimed to be bio-weapons laboratories, and declared them to be no such thing. More hard-line conspiracy theorists maintain Dr Kelly’s death was yet another in a suspicious pattern of untimely deaths among the world’s leading microbiologists, who are being systematically bumped off for reasons that remain unclear.
However weird the theories, Kelly’s death was not properly investigated. The glaring omissions and conflicts of evidence; the choice of an inquiry, headed by a judge rather than a coroner, with terms drawn up at the outset by the government; the continuing unease of expert doctors and political figures, willing to risk their own reputations to publicize their misgivings—all this suggests there is far more to this event than the government is willing to be open about. Given that the present government would still have much to lose should it be revealed that Kelly’s death was unlawful, it is likely to be a long time before all the factors surrounding this case reach the light of day.
www.thehutton- inquiry.org.uk/content/evidence.htm
www.news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/3076869. stm
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/kelly/story/0,102 1802.00.html
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/kelly/story/0,177 9197,00.html
