Wednesday 8 June 2011

The Death of David Kelly - Transparency and the Attorney General's consideration of the need for an inquest

The release by the Ministry of Justice of the postmortem and toxicology reports relating to the death of Dr. David Kelly on 22nd October 2010 was, in my view, a major step forward in demonstrating that Dr. Kelly was murdered.

See Dr Kelly post mortem and toxicology reports for links to the postmortem and toxicology reports.

For the first time the weaknesses in the evidence supposedly supporting the "suicide hypothesis" were open to public examination.

I have asked the Attorney General similarly to make available the report(s) produced by the expert(s), in for example forensic pathology and psychiatry, that he has consulted during his consideration of the application to him in terms of Section 13 of the Coroners Act 1988.

The request to the Attorney General was sent yesterday via Mr. Kevin McGinty of the Attorney General's Office.

The title of the email was:

David Kelly - Transparency


The text of the email was:


[Additional copies are being sent due to a problem with Mr. McGinty's email address at present.]

Mr McGinty,

I write in connection with the ongoing consideration by the Attorney General of a possible application to the High Court to seek an Order that an inquest be held into the death of Dr. David Kelly.

On the Number 10 web site it states, "We want to be the most open and transparent government in the world." (See http://transparency.number10.gov.uk/ ).

I write to enquire how the Government's aspiration of transparency will be expressed in connection with the Attorney General's consideration of the murder of Dr. David Kelly.

The Attorney General may recall that I have explicitly asked that he seek formal advice from a forensic pathologist, from a forensic biologist and from a forensic scientist with expertise in examination of wounds and the weapons which may have made them.

I made those requests on the basis of serious concerns regarding the reliability and integrity of the evidence given to the Hutton Inquiry.

Of course, each of those experts consulted should be visibly independent of Dr. Hunt, forensic pathologist, and Mr. Green, forensic biologist, who gave such unsatisfactory and/or misleading evidence to the Hutton Inquiry.

Will the Attorney General identify all the forensic pathology experts consulted and publish the report(s) of the forensic pathologist(s) that he has consulted? If not, given that a forensic pathologist should be providing solely technical opinion, what legitimate reason can there be for withholding the information from the public?

Similar questions apply to the requested expert reports on the forensic biology, forensic science and psychiatric assessments.

Those are technical documents. If the technical assessments are reliable then, I suggest, they ought to be put into the public domain to allow others to assess whether the experts have taken into consideration all the relevant facts and whether their assessment is reliable.

If the Attorney General chooses, or has chosen, not to seek expert assessments of the kind I have requested will he publicly state his reasons for such a basic failure to examine the technical evidence?

I would also point out that at the present time the original forensic biology report of Mr. Roy Green, the DNA report (carried out, I assume, by Dr. Eileen Hickey) and the postmortem report of 19th July 2003 continue to be concealed. As do all the photographs taken at or around the scene at Harrowdown Hill.

How can there be any prospect of public confidence in the outcome of the Hutton Inquiry while the evidence continues to be concealed by the Government?

Thank you.

(Dr) Andrew Watt

6 comments:

  1. ACC Page’s apparent erroneous statement to the Hutton Inquiry may be interpreted as stupidity or incompetence; it is neither, it is simply a lie.

    “I think as I pointed out in my last evidence, the examination of the scene and the supporting forensic evidence made me confident that actually there was no third party involved at the scene of the crime and therefore, to all intents and purposes, murder can be ruled out. One is then left with the option that Dr Kelly killed himself.”

    There is a mountain of evidence that 3rd parties were not only involved at the scene but they included Thames Valley police officers. The body did not move itself, police officers were present, on each occasion, when the body was moved.

    ACC Page lied to cover up police involvement in arrangement of the death scene. And once that part of the argument has been deconstructed (no third parties at the scene) then his conclusion that it must be suicide is as flawed as his evidence.

    But Mr Page reveals what he knows to be true in a Freudian slip “there was no third party involved at the scene of the crime”. Mr Page knows better than most that no crime has taken occurred until a conviction has been passed, he is confident that neither he nor his officers will ever stand trial for conspiring to pervert the course of justice, so is the “crime” that Mr Page is referring to the one they have just got away with?

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  2. LL
    I would call it a perversion of justice scene, rather than a crime scene.

    Would one expect evidence of a third party at a crime scene or a perversion of the course of justice scene? Of course not. It could be speculated upon that Tony Blair for example might have had an interest in seeing Dr Kelly's death papered over. But it is ludicrous to imply that his DNA might be left on Harrowdown Hill....
    In fact the main third party beneficiaries of this "crime scene" seems to be the legal profession which had a beanfeast at the UK taxpayer's expense during the Hutton Inquiry and lazy journalists who could fill their pages with officially sanctioned disinformation and zero insight.

    There is a nice example from Nashville USA on this video where investigators other than the police took over finding (mobile phone) evidence when the police seemed disinclined to uncover too much...

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  3. LL,

    For ACC Page's statement that you quote in the second paragraph of your comment to be credible, we need to know the evidence!

    And, this being the Hutton Inquiry, the evidence is never explored in a meaningful level of detail.

    Without knowing the evidence we have no basis to know whether ACC Page is blowing smoke or has a logical basis for his unsubstantiated assertion.

    As is so often the case at the Hutton Inquiry fundamental questions weren't asked.

    Stricly speaking we don't know whether or not TVP officers were present or not when the body was moved.

    Some of the truest words spoken by ACC Page came when he referred to the "scene of the crime" (See his evidence on the afternoon of Tuesday 23rd September 2003 at page 195).

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  4. Felix,

    Perverting the course of justice is a crime!

    So if the scene were set falsely to portray a suicide when the reality was a murder then arguably the scene is itself a crime scene.

    The question, in that event, is who was the Scene Setter? Or who were the Scene Setters?

    And who, perhaps, was the Puppet Master pulling the strings of the Scene Setter(s)?

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  5. Was there more than one crime scene?

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  6. Felix,

    It's entirely possible that there was more than one crime scene.

    Police vehicles gained access to a point in a field very close to the place where the body was found. If the body was dumped then it's entirely possible that it was brought to the same spot in a vehicle then carried into the wood along a route broadly similar to the Common Approach Path.

    By parking numerous vehicles in that area, any evidence of a hypothetical vehicle involved in dumping the body would, conveniently, be obliterated.

    Other methods of delivery of the body are also possible.

    We have no evidence as to the reason(s) for the presence of the "boat people" in the vicinity, for example.

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