Did two hired assassins snatch weapons inspector David Kelly?"It's rickydoodulous!"There is absolutely no reason to believe that Dr David Kelly didn't kill himself. But that won't stop MP Norman (Hilda) Baker from pursuing his crackpot ideas. Baker is such a twat that demolishing his 'evidence' is like shooting fish in a very small barrel but just because something is easy doesn't mean it shouldn't be done :)
Baker says that Dr Kelly's behaviour on the day of his disappearance doesn't
'fit the profile of a man about to commit suicide'. I wish I had a tenner for every time I hear something similar. It reminds me of the old joke about a guy who drowned after jumping into the Thames. His friend couldn't understand it. "I saw him the day before" he says, "and he seemed so buoyant". Boom, boom. There isn't a 'profile'. In many cases suicide is inexplicable. It is a very private and personal act.
My father attempted suicide some years ago, in a very similar way to Dr Kelly, overdose followed by wrist cutting. The difference was he was actually at home when he did it and I was there, along with my sister, brother and mother. At one point he came into the kitchen and chatted to us while surreptitiously pocketing a sharp knife which he then used in the bedroom to try and finish the job he had started with an overdose some time before. Did he fit the profile of a man not just contemplating suicide but actually in the process of trying to kill himself?
Mrs Kelly said that her husband was 'tired, subdued, but not depressed'. With the greatest respect to Mrs Kelly I have to say that to any objective observer with any experience of depressive illness it is clear that her husband was severely depressed and had been for some time. Dr Kelly was a crushed and defeated man and his despondency was written all over his face.
Let's briefly deal with some of Baker's claims:
One of the few clues to what happened next is that Dr Kelly's phone was switched off when a colleague from the Ministry of Defence tried to call him between 5pm and 6pm.
This was odd. Dr Kelly himself would tell friends that his mobile was always on and, given that he had been in regular contact with the MoD that morning, and that the furore surrounding him was developing from hour to hour, it seems unlikely that he would have turned it off or let the battery run down. If he did indeed intend to commit suicide, turning off his phone could be seen as a preliminary step. But for reasons I have made clear, I do not believe suicide is a credible explanation for his death. This leaves us with an alternative possibility. Did someone else turn Dr Kelly's phone off so that his movements could not be traced via signal kept by the phone company? In other words, was he forcibly abducted?
Classic! Turning off his phone would have been perfectly understandable if he had intended to kill himself and would not have warranted any comment nor been seen as suspicious in any way. But as Baker is convinced that Kelly was murdered the switched off phone now becomes evidence not for suicide but for the murder plot Baker is trying to prove. Ah, the wonderful logic of politicians.
Baker next lists some of the substances which could have been injected into Dr Kelly's posterior (the method used to kill him, acccording to Baker's 'informant') or introduced via the hairs in his armpit (according to another 'source') including shellfish toxins, parathion and succinylcholine (a favourite of the US TV series
Forensic Detectives) and then takes us on a trip which includes the South African secret police, Porten Down and Mrs Thatcher, pausing to ask Dr Wouter Basson, variously described as 'the South African Mengele' and 'Dr Death', whether he thought Dr Kelly had been murdered: "He paused, as if choosing his words carefully, then replied that Dr Kelly 'didn't seem the sort to commit suicide'." Well, there you have it, case closed!
Another ghastly suggestion came to me from someone who signed themselves only as 'Nemesis' (sic). Their letter alleged that he or she had been told by a 'member of the non-English diplomatic corps' that air had been introduced into Dr Kelly's bloodstream through a needle in a vein. Apparently, if present in sufficient quantities, air in the major organs will kill and leave no scar. 'Nemesis' was in no doubt that this was how Dr Kelly's life had ended. "His heart and lungs were full of air," the letter said.
Oh my god! Not the little known 'air in the lungs' murder technique, sometimes known as 'breathing'?
One private detective even suggested to me that Dr Kelly's killers might have made gruesome misuse of the equipment employed by undertakers in embalming, placing a tube into an artery and forcibly pumping the blood out of the body. This would cause unconsciousness and then death, and reinforce the assumption that the victim had lost a lot of blood through a cut - the conclusion reached by Lord Hutton in Dr Kelly's case.
We are expected to seriously believe that having pumped the blood out of Dr Kelly's body at some remote destination in order to make it look like he bled to death his murderers then forgot to bring the blood with them when they dumped his body, leaving the impression that Kelly's death was the work of vampires, presumably.
Another claim which has been made is that Dr Kelly didn't take enough co-proxamol tablets (29) to kill him and that suicide by wrist cuttting is rare. These observations were made by medically trained and qualified doctors, which is a little worrying given that a quick check of Google shows that in 2001 Co-Proxamol was the second most commonly used drug in overdose suicides and that a
study of 119 cases in which toxicology results were available revealed there were four deaths caused by ingestion of fewer than 20 tablets, 11 deaths caused by ingesting between 20 and 39 and that the lowest number of tablets used was just ten.
As for wrist-cutting, rare or not, as I mentioned above, my own father used the self same method some years ago and, I suspect, for the self same reasons as Dr Kelly - the tablets didn't appear to be working.
Dr Kelly went out that afternoon intent on killing himself and dying peacefully and non-violently in the countryside he loved. He had heart problems and quite reasonably thought that 29 Co-Proxamol would be a fatal dose. He probably slipped into unconciousness but at some point (possibly several hours later) he stirred and, realizing that the overdose hadn't killed him, proceeded to sever a small artery in his wrist. There would have been no dramatic spurting of blood and, given his heart condition and the effects of the tablets his blood pressure would have dropped to a point where death ensued reasonably quickly. He bled to death, probably in the early hours of the morning of 17th July 2003, alone in an Oxfordshire wood, another victim of the murderous war-mongering policy of Tony Blair and his supporters.
Update: See also
Aaronovich in The Times
The election season is upon us. And that means only one thing: Hillary Clinton will be topic #1 across the nation for at least the next year.
In 1909 London’s first dedicated department store opened in a glorious burst of publicity, spearheaded by the largest advertising campaign ever mounted in the British press. 
