The campaign for a full inquest into David Kelly’s death has taken an important step forward with the attorney general’s office reportedly examining files relating to the weapon inspector’s death.
Officials acting on behalf of Dominic Grieve, the government’s senior law officer, requested the Ministry of Justice to supply reports of Kelly’s post mortem examination, and now have them.
The move comes after a sustained campaign by a group of prominent legal and medical experts calling for a full inquest into the 2003 death of the scientist.
Kelly was a British scientist and expert on biological warfare, employed by the Ministry of Defence, and formerly a United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq. He came to public attention in July 2003 when a discussion he had off the record with a BBC journalist, Andrew Gilligan - about the British government’s dossier on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq - inadvertently caused a major political scandal.
His name was leaked to the press as Gilligan’s source, and he was called to appear on 15 July before the parliamentary foreign affairs select committee, which was investigating the issues Gilligan had reported. Kelly was questioned aggressively, and was found dead two days later in Oxfordshire woodland.
Officials will examine the documents this week before making recommendations to the attorney general, who has the power to order a full inquest.
An inquest was suspended by Lord Falconer, then Lord Chancellor, before the Hutton Inquiry into the circumstances of the scientist’s death. It was not resumed after Hutton’s report in 2004 concluded that Kelly killed himself by cutting an artery in his wrist.
Hutton said: “the principal cause of death was bleeding from incised wounds to his left wrist which Dr Kelly had inflicted on himself with the knife found beside his body”.
Back in January, five doctors who made an application to the Oxford coroner to have the inquest reopened, were told that Hutton made a ruling in 2003 to keep medical reports and photographs closed for 70 years. Hutton responded by saying the documents could be revealed to doctors and that he had made the gagging order to spare Kelly’s family “unnecessary distress”.
Hopes for a new inquest have been raised by the change in government. Dominic Grieve, the attorney general, said in April, when he was shadow justice secretary, that the Tories would consider a new inquest into Kelly’s death.
Section 13 of the 1988 Coroners Act allows the High Court to order a new inquest, or to resume a previous inquest, in special cases.
Grieve also called for a review of the government’s decision not to release related medical records and post-mortem documents. The Hutton Inquiry applied a less stringent test than would have been used in an inquest, where a coroner has to be sure “beyond reasonable doubt” that a person intended to kill themselves.
Norman Baker, the Liberal Democrat MP and a junior minister in the coalition government, supports resumption of the inquest. He resigned from the front bench while in opposition to write a book, The Strange Death of David Kelly, which argued that the scientist’s life had been “deliberately taken by others”.
The campaigners, which include Prof Julian Blon, a professor of intensive care medicine, claim that the official cause of death, haemorrhage from the severed artery, was “extremely unlikely”.
They wrote to The Times last month saying: “Insufficient blood would have been lost to threaten life. Absent a quantitative assessment of the blood lost and of the blood remaining in the great vessels, the conclusion that death occurred as a consequence of haemorrhage is unsafe.”
Speaking to Hospital Dr back in February, one of the campaigners David Halpin, a retired orthopaedic surgeon, accused colleagues of moral cowardice in not getting involved.
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 prison and found that only one of the inmates died.
The other doctors in the campaign group include Michael Powers, a QC and former coroner; surgeon Martin Birnstingl; radiologist Stephen Frost and medic Chris Burns-Cox.
They might just be on the verge of a significant victory. As one doctor commented when posting in Hospital Dr’s forum: “People do not die from cuts to the ulnar artery and the amount of distalgesic (his wife’s analgesic) in his system was less than one tablets worth.
“There are other disturbing aspects to this case and sufficient in my view to suspect foul play. If it was a straightforward suicide then why no inquest and why classify the records for 70 years? During the Chilcot Inquiry it would have been very pertinent to know how and why he died. The suggestion is that he was killed to hide an inconvenient truth.
“If he were alive his evidence would have put an end to the lie that Saddam Hussein had any weapons of mass destruction.”
Tags: David Kelly
