The death of the man identified as the source of a story which claimed the British government “sexed up” its dossier on Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction was a “textbook” suicide, a pathologist has said.
Speaking to the Sunday Timesyesterday, Nicholas Hunt, who performed the autopsy on David Kelly, said he found no signs of murder on the body of the former weapons inspector after an eight-hour examination.
The Home Office scientist said he was horrified at the way the Labour government treated Dr Kelly, who was identified as the source of the BBC story on the notorious Iraq dossier.
Mr Hunt said he would welcome an inquest into Dr Kelly’s death, called for by campaigners who question the suicide verdict recorded in the Hutton Inquiry.
He told the Sunday Times:"I felt very, very sorry for David Kelly and the way he had been treated by the government . . . I had every reason to look for something untoward and would dearly love to have found something. It was an absolute classic case of self-inflicted injury. You could illustrate a textbook with it. If it were anyone else and you were to suggest there's something foul about it, you would be referred for additional training. I would welcome an inquest, I've nothing to hide."
Dr Kelly’s body was found in woods near his Oxfordshire home in July 2003, a week after he was identified as the BBC source.
In the outcry that followed, Tony Blair appointed Lord Hutton to head a public inquiry into his death. Unusually, the then lord chancellor Lord Falconer ruled it should also act as an inquest.
Lord Hutton concluded that Dr Kelly took his own life, and that 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”.
He found the scientist took an overdose of co-proxamol tablets – a painkiller commonly used for arthritis – and was suffering from an undiagnosed heart condition.
There have been a number of calls for another examination of the case, most recently from a group of eight experts who wrote to the Times claiming Lord Hutton’s conclusions were unsound.
They argued that a severed ulnar artery, the wound found to Dr Kelly’s wrist, was unlikely to be life-threatening unless an individual had a blood-clotting deficiency. Their viewpoint has been given weight after the detective who found his body revealed he did not see “much blood”.
Mr Hunt said: “Nobody would have seen the amount of blood at the scene. In actual fact there were big, thick clots of blood inside the sleeve, which came down over the wrist, and a lot of blood soaked into the ground."