A surgeon who is fighting the secrecy surrounding the death of Government weapons inspector Dr David Kelly has accused his colleagues of moral cowardice in not getting involved.
David Halpin, a retired orthopaedic surgeon, and five other doctors are taking legal action to force a coroner’s inquest into the death of Dr Kelly, the scientist who died days after being exposed as the source of a BBC story on the Iraq war.
No coroner’s inquest was ever held into Dr Kelly’s death. Instead, the official verdict that Dr Kelly committed suicide by cutting an artery in his wrist, after taking an overdose of painkillers, was provided by the Hutton Inquiry.
The doctors are applying to the Attorney General, Baroness Scotland, for permission to go to the High Court for a new inquest, or the resumption of the previous inquest.
Their case rests on section 13 of the 1988 Coroners Act, which allows the High Court to order a new inquest, or to resume a previous inquest, in special cases.
Lord Hutton had ordered that the medical reports, including the post mortem examination were to remain classified for 70 years. He recently agreed that the doctors could see the autopsy report but they say they are demanding to see the medical records as well.
Halpin has compiled a 14-page dossier prepared as the basis for the legal action.
As a former trauma and orthopaedic surgeon he says he cannot easily accept that even the deepest cut into one wrist would cause enough bleeding to result in death. The two arteries are of matchstick size and would have quickly shut down and clotted. He also argues that a man who was an expert in lethal substances was unlikely to have chosen such an uncertain method of suicide.
“There should be 3,000 surgeons agreeing with me because they know damn well you don’t die of one piddling artery being cut,” he said.
Halpin, whose campaign has consumed thousands of hours over six years, said he is disappointed that more doctors have not spoken out. “Some of my colleagues have said ‘well done’ but some have…not sniggered exactly…but they smile faintly and shrug their shoulders and say ‘well he was bumped off’. There is a cynicism among many doctors which is corrosive in the profession,” he said.
Halpin said in the early days when some media columnists were pouring scorn on his efforts to reveal the truth he was constantly “looking in the rear view mirror” while driving on the dual carriageway.
Halpin first raised his concerns about Kelly’s death in the Morning Star in December 2003. He then discovered other doctors had also been scrutinising the suicide verdict. One colleague Andrew Rouse, an epidemiologist in Birmingham, had trawled for records of deaths from laceration of the wrist. He had also investigated 271 cases of attempted suicide by slashing the wrist at a US penitentiary and found that only one of the inmates died.
Initially the campaign group comprised 11 doctors, but it’s now down to six.
Halpin is confident, however, that there will be an inquest. “It is difficult to see how concealing the details of Kelly’s death would be a threat to national security,” he said.
The other doctors in the group are Michael Powers, a QC and former coroner; surgeon Martin Birnstingl; Stephen Frost and Chris Burns-Cox.