A man who worked for Britain's Secret Intelligence Service MI6 has been found murdered at a flat near the agency's headquarters.
Police said they had found the body of the man aged in his 30s in the top floor flat in the upmarket Pimlico area of London on Monday afternoon.
The victim, named by broadcasters as Gareth Williams, had not been seen for some time and officers had gone to the flat after he was reported missing. A post mortem to determine the cause of death is being carried out today.
Media reports said he was working for MI6, which deals with foreign espionage matters, on secondment from the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the government's eavesdropping service.
"This is a police matter. It's a long-standing policy of the government not to confirm or deny any individual working for the intelligence agencies," said a spokeswoman for the Foreign Office.
A police spokesman said the body was yet to be formally identified.
The investigation into the death is being carried out by the Homicide and Serious Crime Command, indicating that detectives do not believe the death to be related to terrorism or espionage matters.
Officers discovered Mr Williams after breaking into the flat on Monday afternoon when the alarm was raised by colleagues who had not seen him for “some time”.
They found his decomposing body, as well as his mobile phone and several Sim cards, laid out nearby at the top-floor flat in Alderney Street, Pimlico.
Sources close to the inquiry said it is not clear how he died and played down speculation that the murder is linked to his secretive line of work. One source said: “The suggestion there is terrorism or national security links to this case is pretty low down the list of probabilities.”
"It was a terrible shock. I couldn't believe that such a thing had happened," William Hughes, a relative of Williams, told BBC television.
"He had worked for GCHQ for many years. I knew he was working in London doing something but he would never talk about his work, and the family knew not to ask."
Neighbours described Mr Williams as an “extremely friendly” and athletic man who enjoyed cycling and had a strong Welsh accent. They said he had lived in London for about a year and was planning to return to Cheltenham, where he rented a flat.
The scene of the murder is a two-storey flat on a prestigious street among a row of expensive five-storey Victorian townhouses. Residents are mainly bankers and politicians, including former home secretaries Michael Howard and Lord Brittan.
The ownership of the building is hidden behind the private company New Rodina, registered in the British Virgin Islands. The property was bought for £675,250 in 2000, remortgaged twice and the word rodina means “motherland” in Russian and Bulgarian.
Public documents revealed several current and former residents of the freehold block have links to London and Cheltenham.
One Frenchman who lived at the flat between 2005 and 2006 is an expert in global satellite positioning, radio communications and high sensitivity antennae.
It is the first murder on British soil of someone linked to the secret services since the death of Alexander Litvinenko in 2006. The former KGB agent died in hospital after drinking tea laced with radioactive polonium-210.
Bulgarian defector Georgi Markov was killed by an assassin who used an umbrella to fire a deadly ricin pellet into his leg as he walked across Waterloo Bridge in September 1978.
Reuters/PA
