13 doctors demand inquest into weapons expert Dr David Kelly’s death

He could not have died from loss of blood, say the experts

Daily Mail |  Jul 12, 2009

By Glen Owen and Miles Goslett

The death of Government scientist David Kelly returned to haunt Labour today as a group of doctors announced that they were mounting a legal challenge to overturn the finding of suicide.

Dr Kelly’s body was found six years ago this week in woods close to his Oxfordshire home, shortly after he was exposed as the source of a BBC news report questioning the grounds for war in Iraq.

Unusually, no coroner’s inquest was held into his death.

The only official verdict has come from the Hutton Inquiry, commissioned by Tony Blair, which concluded that Dr Kelly, 59, died from loss of blood after cutting his wrist with a blunt gardening knife.

Critics regarded the report as a ‘whitewash’, and Mr Blair remains acutely sensitive to the accusation that he has ‘blood on his hands’ over the scientist’s death.

But now a team of 13 specialist doctors has compiled a detailed medical dossier that rejects the Hutton conclusion on the grounds that a cut to the ulnar artery, which is small and difficult to access, could not have caused death.

It will be used by their lawyers to demand a formal inquest and the release of Dr Kelly’s autopsy report, which has never been published. It will also be sent to Sir John Chilcot’s forthcoming inquiry into the Iraq War.

The 12-page opinion, a copy of which has been seen by The Mail on Sunday, concludes: ‘The bleeding from Dr Kelly’s ulnar artery is highly unlikely to have been so voluminous and rapid that it was the cause of death.

‘We advise the instructing solicitors to obtain the autopsy reports so that the concerns of a group of properly interested medical specialists can be answered.’

The doctors do not say how, or why, they believe Dr Kelly did die but they have worked closely with campaigning Liberal Democrat MP Norman Baker, who believes that the scientist was murdered by enemies he made in the course of his work as a weapons inspector.

And two of the doctors have added to the sense of persistent intrigue surrounding Dr Kelly by claiming that thousands of emails relating to the case had ‘vanished’ from their computers, in what one claimed was an act of ’state-sponsored sabotage’.

A coroner’s inquest into Dr Kelly’s death was suspended before it could begin by order of the then Lord Chancellor Lord Falconer. He used the Coroners Act to designate the Hutton Inquiry as ‘fulfilling the function of an inquest’, but as a judicial investigation it had no power to make witnesses give evidence under oath.

After taking evidence from – but not cross-examining – Dr Nicholas Hunt, the pathologist who carried out the post-mortem examination, Lord Hutton concluded that ‘the principal cause of death was bleeding from incised wounds to the left wrist’ combined with the consumption of painkillers and ’silent coronary artery disease’.

The doctors also say that the level of the painkiller co-proxamol in Dr Kelly’s blood was about one third of that required to produce death and point to Dr Hunt’s comments at the end of giving evidence to Lord Hutton.

Asked if there was anything further he would like to say on the circumstances leading to Dr Kelly’s death, he said: ‘Nothing I could say as a pathologist, no.’

After the report was published, Dr Hunt added to the doctors’ suspicions by telling Channel 4 that he thought a full coroner’s inquest should be held.

The doctors have hired solicitor Martin Day, of Leigh Day and Co, and received advice from barrister Richard Hermer, QC, both of whom have a strong track record in civil liberties actions, including winning nearly ?3million in compensation from the British Government for the family of Iraqi Baha Mousa, who died while being detained by UK troops.

They intend to use the Coroners Act to challenge Lord Falconer’s suspension of the inquest.

One of the doctors, David Halpin, told The Mail on Sunday that they had argued their case in the legal document in ‘microscopic’ detail.
He said: ‘We reject haemorrhage as the cause of death and see no contrary opinion which would stand its ground. I think it is highly likely he was assassinated.’

Mr Baker said: ‘The fact that eminent medical experts feel so strongly that the official explanation for Dr Kelly’s death cannot be sustained and are now taking legal action against the Government to secure a proper inquest demonstrates both how suspect Lord Hutton’s conclusions were and how this dark chapter cannot be closed unless Sir John Chilcott’s inquiry into the Iraq war addresses this issue.

‘A proper inquest into Dr Kelly’s death must take place.’

Among the doctors is Christopher Burns-Cox, 71, the former senior consultant physician for the Frenchay Healthcare Trust, Bristol, and current co-chairman of the NHS consultants’ association.

Mr Halpin, 69, meanwhile, is a former lecturer in anatomy at King’s College, London, and a former consultant in orthopaedic and trauma surgery at Torbay Hospital. He continued in general practice until 2005.

Mr Halpin said that he lost more than 6,000 pieces of correspondence – many relating to Dr Kelly – during his investigation, explaining that the mystery began when the ‘firewall’ on his computer, which all similar machines are fitted with as a security measure, became inactive without warning.

His emails started disappearing as though they were being sifted remotely. ‘I believe this will have been done by a state-sponsored agency and not by an amateur acting singly,’ he said.

A close associate of Mr Halpin’s who has also taken an active interest in the case confirmed to The Mail on Sunday that at around the same time he, too, fell victim to what he believes was a rogue agent, losing ’somewhere in the region of 2,000 emails’, many of which discussed Dr Kelly.

For professional reasons, the individual concerned, a civil servant, said that he could not be identified by name.

He said: ‘I have no doubt that my computer was hacked into and I also have reason to believe that both my mobile telephone and my landline have been bugged until fairly recently. It echoes on the end of the line, things like that.

‘But if I made an accusation like that in public without being able to prove it, it would compromise me and for the sake of my children I do not want to enter that territory. I cannot say any more about it at the moment.’

Mr Baker, who published a book about Dr Kelly’s death in 2007, also believes that his computer was hacked into remotely, leading to the loss of sensitive files about David Kelly from his constituency office in Lewes, East Sussex.

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And Mr Halpin added that Rowena Thursby, who helped establish the Kelly Investigation Group which has campaigned for the inquest into Dr Kelly’s death to be reopened on several occasions, has also lost scores of emails in a similar, suspicious manner.

The developments come as investigative journalist Bob Coen prepares to screen a 90-minute documentary, Anthrax War, in London on the sixth anniversary of Dr Kelly’s death, this Friday.

The film claims that Dr Kelly’s death may have been linked to the secret world of germ warfare research.

Until his death Dr Kelly was privy to some of the state’s most sensitive information and worked closely with the intelligence services of all the major industrialised countries.

Among notable claims in the film, which was made over four years, is Dr Kelly’s connection with Dr Walter Basson, whose work for the South African apartheid regime used chemical and biological weapons research destined for extrajudicial execution, and whose goals included ethnic cleansing.

The film also suggests that Dr Kelly was preparing to write a book that would have breached the Official Secrets Act.

The draft version of the doctors’ dossier – a final version, including diagrams and a copy of Dr Kelly’s death certificate, is being prepared for lawyers this week – concentrates on the ulnar artery, a blood vessel in the forearm.

The Hutton Report quoted Dr Nicholas Hunt, the forensic pathologist who examined Dr Kelly’s corpse, as seeing ‘evidence of a significant incised wound to his left wrist, in the depths of which his left artery had been completely severed…

‘The arterial injury had resulted in the loss of a significant volume of blood, as noted at the scene.’

But the doctors draw on their specialist knowledge of human anatomy to argue in detail that a wound to this artery could not have resulted in enough blood loss to cause his death.

‘This artery has the width of a matchstick in its constricted state,’ they write.

‘It is not easily felt on the little finger side of the wrist… on the contrary, the radial artery pulse is easily felt beneath the skin on the opposite side of the wrist. It is thus more difficult to cut the ulnar artery.’

They go on to argue that, according to the evidence given by Dr Hunt to Lord Hutton’s inquiry, Dr Kelly’s blood would have quickly clotted, thus stemming the flow and preventing his death.

They write: ‘Dr Hunt describes complete severance of this artery, ie transection. This means the elasticity of the artery would have caused it to retract within its sheath.

‘Contraction of the circular smooth muscle within the arterial wall would have narrowed the artery, thus reducing or stopping blood flow.

Blood clots would have formed in the wound, but also within the narrowed artery.

‘That clotting within the artery would have happened more speedily because the cutting was done with considerable trauma, thus causing more damage to the lining membrane, the intima.

Damage to the cells of the intima causes aggregation of blood platelets, thus hastening clotting within the vessel.’

The doctors cite a number of studies which they say prove for ‘all practical purposes’ that suicide using the means allegedly adopted by Dr Kelly ‘does not exist in Britain’.

Although the doctors do not believe the painkillers taken by Dr Kelly contributed to his death in any way – as argued by Lord Hutton – they have restricted the scope of their dossier to refute the reasoning he used on the question of haemorrhage.

CIA and Pentagon Deploy RFID “Death Chips.” Coming Soon to a Product Near You!

First it was cattle. Then it was pets. Then Mexicans. Now the tribal areas of Pakistan where the CIA is equipping Pakistani tribesmen with secret transmitters to call in airstrikes targeting al-Qaida and Taliban militants. A drone, guided by the signal from the chip, destroys the building with a salvo of missiles scattering body parts everywhere. Will Americans and the rest of the “free world” be next? Long perceived as a crazy conspiracy theory, radio-frequency identification chips (RFID) have surreptitiously penetrated every aspect of society and may soon literally get under our skin for ubiquitous surveillance. Back to Orwell … “The future is now” as Burghardt admonishes!

VoltaireNet | Jun 16, 2006

by Tom Burghardt

What Pentagon theorists describe as a “Revolution in Military Affairs” (RMA) leverages information technology to facilitate (so they allege) command decision-making processes and mission effectiveness, i.e. the waging of aggressive wars of conquest.

It is assumed that U.S. technological preeminence, referred to euphemistically by Airforce Magazine as “compressing the kill chain,” will assure American military hegemony well into the 21st century. Indeed a 2001 study, [1], brought together analysts from a host of Pentagon agencies as well as defense contractors Boeing, Booz Allen Hamilton and the MITRE Corporation and consultants from ThoughtLink, Toffler Associates and the RAND Corporation who proposed to do just.

As a result of this and other Pentagon-sponsored research, military operations from Afghanistan to Iraq and beyond aim for “defined effects” through “kinetic” and “non-kinetic” means: leadership decapitation through preemptive strikes combined with psychological operations designed to pacify (terrorize) insurgent populations. This deadly combination of high- and low tech tactics is the dark heart of the Pentagon’s Unconventional Warfare doctrine.

In this respect, “network-centric warfare” advocates believe U.S. forces can now dominate entire societies through ubiquitous surveillance, an always-on “situational awareness” maintained by cutting edge sensor arrays as well as by devastating aerial attacks by armed drones, warplanes and Special Forces robosoldiers.

Meanwhile on the home front, urbanized RMA in the form of ubiquitous CCTV systems deployed on city streets, driftnet electronic surveillance of private communications and radio-frequency identification (RFID) chips embedded in commodities are all aspects of a control system within securitized societies such as ours.

As Antifascist Calling has written on more than one occasion, contemporary U.S. military operations are conceived as a branch of capitalist management theory, one that shares more than a passing resemblance to the organization of corporate entities such as Wal-Mart.

Similar to RMA, commodity flows are mediated by an ubiquitous surveillance of products–and consumers–electronically. Indeed, Pentagon theorists conceive of “postmodern” warfare as just another manageable network enterprise.

The RFID (Counter) Revolution

Radio-frequency identification tags are small computer chips connected to miniature antennae that can be fixed to or implanted within physical objects, including human beings. The chip itself contains an Electronic Product Code that can be read each time a reader emits a radio signal.

The chips are subdivided into two distinct categories, passive or active. A passive tag doesn’t contain a battery and its read range is variable, from less than an inch to twenty or thirty feet. An active tag on the other hand, is self-powered and has a much longer range. The data from an active tag can be sent directly to a computer system involved in inventory control–or weapons targeting.

It is hardly surprising then, that the Pentagon and the CIA have spent “hundreds of millions of dollars researching, developing, and purchasing a slew of ‘Tagging tracking and locating’ (TTL) gear,” Wired reports.

Long regarded as an urban myth, the military’s deployment of juiced-up RFID technology along the AfPak border in the form of “tiny homing beacons to guide their drone strikes in Pakistan,” has apparently moved out of the laboratory. “Most of these technologies are highly classified” Wired reveals,

“But there’s enough information in the open literature to get a sense of what the government is pursuing: laser-based reflectors, super-strength RFID tags, and homing beacons so tiny, they can be woven into fabric or into paper.

Some of the gadgets are already commercially available; if you’re carrying around a phone or some other mobile gadget, you can be tracked–either through the GPS chip embedded in the gizmo, or by triangulating the cell signal. Defense contractor EWA Government Systems, Inc. makes a radio frequency-based “Bigfoot Remote Tagging System” that’s the size of a couple of AA batteries. But the government has been working to make these terrorist tracking tags even smaller. (David Hambling and Noah Shachtman, “Inside the Military’s Secret Terror-Tagging Tech,” Wired, June 3, 2009)

Electronic Warfare Associates, Inc. (EWA) is a little-known Herndon, Virginia-based niche company comprised of nine separate operating entities “each with varying areas of expertise,” according to the firm’s website. Small by industry standards, EWA has annual revenue of some $20 million, Business First reports. According to Washington Technology, the firm provides “information technology, threat analysis, and test and evaluation applications” for the Department of Defense.

The majority of the company’s products are designed for signals intelligence and surveillance operations, including the interception of wireless communications. According to EWA, its Bigfoot Remote Tagging System is “ideal” for “high-value target” missions and intelligence operations.

EWA however, isn’t the only player in this deadly game. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Pentagon’s geek-squad, has been developing “small, environmentally robust, retro reflector-based tags that can be read by both handheld and airborne sensors at significant ranges,” according to a presentation produced by the agency’s Strategic Technology Office (STO).

Known as “DOTS,” Dynamic Optical Tags, DARPA claims that the system is comprised of a series of “small active retroreflecting optical tags for 2-way data exchange.” The tags are small, 25×25×25 mm with a range of some 10 km and a two month shelf-life; far greater than even the most sophisticated RFID tags commercially available today. Sold as a system possessing a “low probability of detection,” the devices can be covertly planted around alleged terrorist safehouses–or the home of a political rival or innocent citizen–which can then be targeted at will by Predator or Reaper drones.

Full Story

Secret Societies and The Military

“[Their god is] the Brotherhood. It’s very German, it has Masonic leanings. They’re all Masons. This Brotherhood — Opus Dei — they’re the Mob. The Marine Corps are the hit men. They’re mercenaries. They’ll work for anybody. They’ll switch hats. My husband said it’s no big deal. I’ll go work for the State Department.”

- Kay Griggs

The Kay Griggs Interviews

By Pastor Rick Strawcutter

Kay Griggs was a Southern divorcee who rented a room to Marine Corps colonel George Griggs in the late 1980s. She was impressed by his clipped manner, his education, his good looks. Two months later she married him. What she found out about world affairs as George Griggs’ wife was astounding.

Colonel Griggs was a Marine Corps Chief of Staff, as well as head of NATO’s Psychological Operations. He was also, his wife realized, entirely mind-controlled. Kay, a self-declared Christian, became privy to the real workings of the United States military, leadership training, drug-running and weapons sales, and the secret worldwide camps that train professional assassins.

These interviews with Pastor Rick Strawcutter of Adrian, Michigan were conducted in 1998, before September 11th and the installation of U.S. President George W. Bush. Kay Griggs’ report of world events and the power elite paints a picture that begins to explain the hows and whys of our current global scenario.

Quotes from Kay Griggs:

“They took with them the most perverted aspects of Nazi Germany and brought them over to the United States.”

“They get rid of the good guys. The Marine Corps are the assassins for the Mob. The military is run by the Mob. The military IS the Mob.”

“He told me what they did. They nurture–they cultivate–the sons of prominent families. They’re called “rising stars.” They rope them in. Then they “turn” them.”

ON ASSASSINS: “What my husband does for a living is train mercenaries — young boys from countries like Romania, Dominican Republic, Haiti. They’re training them to be murderers, and the taxpayers’ dollars are paying for this. They psychologically profile them. The profile is similar to my husband’s and Lee Harvey Oswald’s and [Timothy] McVeigh’s, and others who were all part of this program. Jeffrey Dahmer was part of this program. They’re all Army. They were all picked out because they were perverted or twisted. [The military profiles for] strong mother, weak father, no father, poor. Because these guys are looking for security, so they will stay in the military and do anything for that security.” (Interviews, Disk 1)

“When you work in the White House, you work under the Army. The Marines have no overlord, as such. They can float. They’re run out of New Orleans, just like Oswald was. Oswald was homosexually recruited by Jack Rubinstein, who was Jack Ruby. All of the funding for these operations goes through the “joint” — the Mob. Oswald was a loner, brilliant — and a perfect candidate. His [profile] and my husband’s profile almost look alike.” (Interviews, Disk 2)

ON TRUTH TELLERS: “St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, like the Eastern State Hospital in Williamsburg, has Army intelligence people in there. They’re targets — people who have decided to tell the truth. People who believe in the American dream, who are Christians, who are trying to get things straightened out. If they transgress that line where they upset somebody in high command — just like in Germany — they all of a sudden move from being a person to being a target. Therefore, the enemy. Why are good people silenced, why are their papers gone through?” (Interviews, Disk 3)

ON THE CIA: “This CIA thing, from my experience, is bogus. Every person I’ve known who was in the CIA was in military intelligence first. For example, my husband. He works under the Army. He’s a Marine Corps high-level intelligence officer, but he’s under all these Army people.” (Interviews, Disk 3)

ON LOYALTY: “Now these generals in the Marine Corps and Army, according to my husband, they are ordered. My husband, being Chief of Staff, told his men it was like this: It’s the Marine Corps first — the Brotherhood, the Cherry Marines, the bonding that goes on. The Marine Corps comes before God, before Jesus Christ, before the country. My husband is not a Christian, he’s an existentialist, and most of these guys are. [Their god is] the Brotherhood. It’s very German, it has Masonic leanings. They’re all Masons. This Brotherhood — Opus Dei — they’re the Mob. The Marine Corps are the hit men. They’re mercenaries. They’ll work for anybody. They’ll switch hats. My husband said it’s no big deal. I’ll go work for the State Department.

“The Marine Corps is just a smoke-and-mirrors thing. On [my husband's] level, he said we’ve never been an enemy to the Soviet Union. They work with these Communists. The man who started this whole intelligence operation — OSS [Office of Strategic Services] — he was recruiting known Communists who were involved in subverting Spain. They’re not Americans. They’re not Christians. They’re German existentialists. Now what are they doing running our nation? They have more affinity for the State of Israel than they do our nation. They don’t care about American citizens. The judges now in the courts are all military officers following chain-of-command orders. They’re not independent judges.” (Interviews, Disk 4)

______

Related

Kay Griggs Homepage

‘Mafia Cops’ Get Life, and Their Pensions

Stephen Caracappa, left, and Louis J. Eppolito received life sentences for a second time after a federal appellate court reinstated their 2006 conspiracy convictions.

NY Times | Mar 6, 2009

By JIM DWYER

A side door swung open, and the two retired police detectives, dressed in shapeless prison scrubs, walked into the courtroom. They looked as if they had been shipwrecked.

Nearly three years ago, the two men, Stephen Caracappa and Louis J. Eppolito, were convicted of serving as assassins and spies for the Mafia while they were employed as detectives for the Police Department.

A case of outsize horrors and drastic turns — plus celebrity lawyers, three books, and a conviction reversed, then restored — came to its reckoning Friday afternoon on the 10th floor of the federal courthouse in Brooklyn. By day’s end, it would provide one more twist from its store of the absurd.

“These two defendants have committed what amounts to treason against the people of the City of New York and their fellow police officers,” said Judge Jack B. Weinstein of United States District Court.

He sentenced Mr. Eppolito to life plus 100 years, and fined him $4.75 million; Mr. Caracappa got life plus 80 years, and a fine of $4.25 million. The judge said both men were likely to have “hidden assets” from their crimes.

Yet one asset — in plain sight — might not be seized to pay their debts.

Both men have been drawing tax-free disability pensions from the city since they left the Police Department, according to city records. Mr. Caracappa, who retired in 1992 as a first-grade detective, receives $5,313 a month. Mr. Eppolito, who retired in 1990 as a second-grade detective, is paid $3,896 a month. Because they retired before they were accused of crimes, their pensions will continue.

Moreover, the pensions are not subject to seizure for payment of the fines, said Joseph A. Bondy, the lawyer for Mr. Caracappa. “I fought the government for Peter Gotti when they tried to garnish a disability pension, and we won,” said Mr. Bondy, who defended Mr. Gotti on murder and racketeering charges in 2004.

Under state law, public pensions are treated as property held in trust for the employees, and periodic efforts to make their forfeiture a penalty for corrupt public employees have failed. The Daily News reported last year that 450 corrupt former officials, judges and police officers were receiving pensions.

While both men have families, the two are likely to have little use in prison for the tax-free bounty that, in theory, they earned during the years that, a jury found, they were also killing for the Mafia, setting up informants for death or exposure, and poring through confidential police computers in service of the organized crime figures who were providing them with regular payoffs.

At 67, Mr. Caracappa has grown gaunt, the color so vanished from his face that it was hard to say where a scraggly gray beard met his pallid skin; Mr. Eppolito, 60, appeared to have lost weight behind bars, but remained a round, burly figure whose face reddened as a son and a daughter of two victims stood to describe their losses.

Their trial in 2006 lasted three weeks, and was built on testimony from Burton Kaplan, a wholesale garment dealer who had gone into multiple schemes with organized crime figures. He was the subject of “The Good Rat” (Ecco, 2008), a pitch-perfect account by Jimmy Breslin, who described how Mr. Caracappa helped a Mafia patron hunt for a Nicholas Guido by using a police computer. But the detective provided the address of a different man, a young telephone installer with the same name as the hitmen’s prey. He was killed in front of his home in Park Slope.

The first reports of the detectives’ corruption were made in 1979, and they were implicated a number of times through the 1980s but were never charged, and managed to continue their rise within the police ranks, according to Greg B. Smith’s “Mob Cops” (Berkley, 2006).

In the courtroom on Friday afternoon, a son from one family, then a daughter from another stood to speak for murdered fathers. A man framed by the ex-detectives told them he hoped that they would suffer in prison for the rest of their lives, as he had for 19 years.

Both Mr. Caracappa and Mr. Eppolito protested their innocence on Friday. “You will never take my will to prove how innocent I am,” Mr. Caracappa said.

One of those who spoke was Yael Perlman, the daughter of a gem dealer, Israel Greenwald, whose business dealings with Mr. Kaplan went sour. He was pulled off a highway by the two detectives in 1986, killed and buried under an auto repair shop. She was 7 years old then, and it was not until 2005 that his remains were found. The lack of a body “prevented us from receiving the small material respite of life insurance,” Ms. Perlman said.

Told later that both men would continue to receive their police pensions, she said, “That’s sick.”

Israel assassinating Iranian nuclear scientists

JTA | Feb 18, 2009

LONDON (JTA) — Israel is assassinating Iranian nuclear scientists as part of a covert war against the Islamic Republic’s weapons program, according to a British newspaper.

The Daily Telegraph cited U.S. intelligence claims that Israel is using hit men, sabotage, front companies and double agents to disrupt the regime’s illicit weapons project.

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“The aim is to slow down or interrupt Iran’s research program without the gamble of a direct confrontation that could lead to a wider war,” an intelligence analyst told the the newspaper.

The newspaper quoted a former CIA officer on Iran who said, “Disruption is designed to slow progress on the program, done in such a way that they don’t realize what’s happening. You are never going to stop it.”

“The goal is delay, delay, delay until you can come up with some other solution or approach. We certainly don’t want the current Iranian government to have those weapons. It’s a good policy, short of taking them out militarily, which probably carries unacceptable risks.”

The Telegraph also quotes Reva Bhalla, a senior analyst with Stratfor, the private U.S. intelligence company with strong government security connections, who claims that the strategy was to take out key people.

“With cooperation from the United States, Israeli covert operations have focused both on eliminating key human assets involved in the nuclear program and in sabotaging the Iranian nuclear supply chain,” she said.

Bhalla added, however, that “As U.S.-Israeli relations are bound to come under strain over the Obama administration’s outreach to Iran, and as the political atmosphere grows in complexity, an intensification of Israeli covert activity against Iran is likely to result.”

Israel has been rumored to be involved in the mysterious death of key Iranian nuclear scientists, including Ardeshire Hassanpour, who died in 2007 of “gas poisoning.”

The Telegraph also quoted another European intelligence official who said that “Israel has shown no hesitation in assassinating weapons scientists for hostile regimes in the past.”

Chechen brothers cleared of murdering Kremlin critic

Dzhabrail, left, and Ibragim Makhmudov, right, with their lawyer Murad Musayev, centre, leave the court yesterday

Shock decision is denounced by human rights campaigners demanding justice for dead Russian journalist

Independent | Feb 20, 2009

By Shaun Walker in Moscow

A court in Moscow has acquitted four men accused of involvement in the murder of the investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya in 2006, in a verdict that was greeted with dismay by human rights activists.

Two Chechen brothers, Dzhabrail and Ibragim Makhmudov, and a former policeman, Sergei Khadzhikurbanov, were found not guilty of murder and freed. A former FSB lieutenant-colonel, Pavel Ryaguzov, was cleared of separate but related charges.

The verdicts bring to a close a confused and chaotic trial that has raised far more questions than it answered. The men standing trial were accused of being accomplices to the crime, but the man who allegedly pulled the trigger – a third Makhmudov brother – is on the run abroad, and the mastermind has also not been revealed.

“We demand and need the real murderer, and we will achieve this,” said Karina Moskalenko, a lawyer for Politkovskaya’s family, outside the courtroom. The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists said it respected the jury’s decision to acquit the defendants based on the evidence state prosecutors presented, “but we are disheartened by the continued impunity in this momentous case. No prosecution will be complete until the triggerman and mastermind are in the dock.”

The Novaya Gazeta journalist was noted for her criticism of the Kremlin and her illumination of human rights abuses in Russia’s restive region of Chechnya. Rights groups suspect that the murder may have been ordered by figures within Russia’s security services, or by Chechnya’s pro-Moscow president Ramzan Kadyrov. But the Kremlin has suggested that the murder was part of a plot to discredit Russia, financed from abroad.

The trial has been plagued by suspicious incidents since it opened in the autumn. The judge initially ruled that the proceedings would be closed to the public after one of the jury members had said they were frightened of being exposed to media glare. A jury member then rang a Moscow radio station to reveal that no such demand had been made, and the judge was forced to backtrack.

What the journalists who were able to squeeze into the small, packed courtroom heard during the trial was an investigation littered with confusing red herrings and loose ends. The court was shown chilling footage of a man in a baseball cap entering Politkovskaya’s apartment on 7 October 2006, a few minutes before the journalist returned home, then re-emerging, having emptied five bullets into Politkovskaya’s head and body.

But why did the killer on the video footage seemingly have much thinner shoulders than the alleged killer, Rustam Makhmudov? Who were the man and woman caught on CCTV following Politkovskaya around a supermarket just hours before her murder? How was Rustam Makhmudov, who worked on operations with Russia’s FSB spy agency, allowed to flee abroad? What were the roles of the large cast of shadowy figures related to the sprawling and shadowy FSB who cropped up during the trial?

In the end, the jury decided that the evidence was not enough for a guilty verdict. The brothers’ lawyer has claimed that they were set up by people who wanted to disguise the identity of the real murderer.

Politkovskaya’s son said yesterday that he believed all four men to be connected to his mother’s murder in at least some way. Novaya Gazeta said it would continue its own investigation into the killing.

A European watchdog called Russia’s failure to bring to justice the killers of journalists a “human rights crisis”. Miklos Haraszti, media freedom representative for the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, said: “There can be no word about freedom of the media in a country where editors have to fear the loss of their best and brightest colleagues for doing their work.”

Last month another Novaya Gazeta reporter, Anastasia Baburova, was shot dead in central Moscow together with a leading human rights lawyer. No arrests have yet been made.

“The whole world was waiting to see how this investigation would end and how the government would act, and in the end we have absolutely nothing,” said the chairman of the Russian Union of Journalists, Vsevolod Bogdanov. “I am desperate for justice and worry that my state looks this way in the eyes of the international community and that there exists this kind of attitude towards my profession.”

*Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former head of the Yukos oil empire, who was jailed in 2005 for tax evasion, will be brought to Moscow to stand trial on further charges.

General George S. Patton was assassinated to silence his criticism of allied war leaders claims new book

“We’ve got a terrible situation with this great patriot, he’s out of control and we must save him from himself”. The OSS head General did not trust Patton

George S. Patton, America’s greatest combat general of the Second World War, was assassinated after the conflict with the connivance of US leaders, according to a new book.

Telegraph | Dec 22, 2008

The newly unearthed diaries of a colourful assassin for the wartime Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA, reveal that American spy chiefs wanted Patton dead because he was threatening to expose allied collusion with the Russians that cost American lives.

The death of General Patton in December 1945, is one of the enduring mysteries of the war era. Although he had suffered serious injuries in a car crash in Manheim, he was thought to be recovering and was on the verge of flying home.

But after a decade-long investigation, military historian Robert Wilcox claims that OSS head General “Wild Bill” Donovan ordered a highly decorated marksman called Douglas Bazata to silence Patton, who gloried in the nickname “Old Blood and Guts”.

His book, “Target Patton”, contains interviews with Mr Bazata, who died in 1999, and extracts from his diaries, detailing how he staged the car crash by getting a troop truck to plough into Patton’s Cadillac and then shot the general with a low-velocity projectile, which broke his neck while his fellow passengers escaped without a scratch.

Mr Bazata also suggested that when Patton began to recover from his injuries, US officials turned a blind eye as agents of the NKVD, the forerunner of the KGB, poisoned the general.

Mr Wilcox told The Sunday Telegraph that when he spoke to Mr Bazata: “He was struggling with himself, all these killings he had done. He confessed to me that he had caused the accident, that he was ordered to do so by Wild Bill Donovan.

“Donovan told him: ‘We’ve got a terrible situation with this great patriot, he’s out of control and we must save him from himself and from ruining everything the allies have done.’ I believe Douglas Bazata. He’s a sterling guy.”

Mr Bazata led an extraordinary life. He was a member of the Jedburghs, the elite unit who parachuted into France to help organise the Resistance in the run up to D-Day in 1944. He earned four purple hearts, a Distinguished Service Cross and the French Croix de Guerre three times over for his efforts.

After the war he became a celebrated artist who enjoyed the patronage of Princess Grace of Monaco and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.

He was friends with Salvador Dali, who painted a portrait of Bazata as Don Quixote.

He ended his career as an aide to President Ronald Reagan’s Navy Secretary John Lehman, a member of the 9/11 Commission and adviser to John McCain’s presidential campaign.

Mr Wilcox also tracked down and interviewed Stephen Skubik, an officer in the Counter-Intelligence Corps of the US Army, who said he learnt that Patton was on Stalin’s death list. Skubik repeatedly alerted Donovan, who simply had him sent back to the US.

“You have two strong witnesses here,” Mr Wilcox said. “The evidence is that the Russians finished the job.”

The scenario sounds far fetched but Mr Wilcox has assembled a compelling case that US officials had something to hide. At least five documents relating to the car accident have been removed from US archives.

The driver of the truck was whisked away to London before he could be questioned and no autopsy was performed on Patton’s body.

With the help of a Cadillac expert from Detroit, Mr Wilcox has proved that the car on display in the Patton museum at Fort Knox is not the one Patton was driving.

“That is a cover-up,” Mr Wilcox said.

George Patton, a dynamic controversialist who wore pearl handled revolvers on each hip and was the subject of an Oscar winning film starring George C. Scott, commanded the US 3rd Army, which cut a swathe through France after D-Day.

But his ambition to get to Berlin before Soviet forces was thwarted by supreme allied commander Dwight D. Eisenhower, who gave Patton’s petrol supplies to the more cautious British General Bernard Montgomery.

Patton, who distrusted the Russians, believed Eisenhower wrongly prevented him closing the so-called Falaise Gap in the autumn of 1944, allowing hundreds of thousands of German troops to escape to fight again,. This led to the deaths of thousands of Americans during their winter counter-offensive that became known as the Battle of the Bulge.

In order to placate Stalin, the 3rd Army was also ordered to a halt as it reached the German border and was prevented from seizing either Berlin or Prague, moves that could have prevented Soviet domination of Eastern Europe after the war.

Mr Wilcox told The Sunday Telegraph: “Patton was going to resign from the Army. He wanted to go to war with the Russians. The administration thought he was nuts.

“He also knew secrets of the war which would have ruined careers.

I don’t think Dwight Eisenhower would ever have been elected president if Patton had lived to say the things he wanted to say.” Mr Wilcox added: “I think there’s enough evidence here that if I were to go to a grand jury I could probably get an indictment, but perhaps not a conviction.”

Charles Province, President of the George S. Patton Historical Society, said he hopes the book will lead to definitive proof of the plot being uncovered. He said: “There were a lot of people who were pretty damn glad that Patton died. He was going to really open the door on a lot of things that they screwed up over there.”

Austrian far-right leader’s death compared with 9/11 and Princess Diana conspiracies

Candles and a photo of Joerg Haider at the site of his fatal car accident in Klagenfurt, Austria. Photograph: Miro Kuzmanovic/Reuters

‘Haider is our Lady Di’

Many voice their suspicion that Haider was murdered by Mossad

As the leaders of Europe’s far-right parties gather for today’s state funeral of Austria’s most controversial politician, is European fascism once again on the rise?

Guardian | Oct 18, 2008

by Kate Connolly

In their hundreds they stand in line, waiting to pay tribute to their hero. Girls with iPods, skinheads in leather jackets, elderly women with shopping trollies and tanned athletic types in Prada sunglasses shuffle silently forward.

“We wanted the kids to feel the enormity of the occasion. After all, he is our Lady Di and this is our 9/11,” says Anton Krem, 45, who is here to pay his last respects to Jörg Haider, the Austrian rightwing populist politician who died in a drunken, high-speed car crash a week ago and whose coffin sits on a pedestal in the Landhaus, seat of Carinthia’s regional parliament, the southern province where he was governor.

An after-work crowd of about 300 makes its way through an avenue of huge wreaths. Everyone from the Chamber of Carinthian Chemists to the regional tourist board has sent a display. Klagenfurt, the state capital, is busy preparing itself for today’s ceremony, the most emotional state funeral since that of the last Austrian empress, Zita von Bourbon-Parma, in 1989.

Amid a sea of red candles one teenager has written: “To a great man of the nation who fought for his land. Our hero, our fighter, our sunshine.” Another note reads: “Our king of hearts”. Slipped in between are pictures of Haider, an orange sweater – the colour of his breakaway Alliance for the Future of Austria party (BZO) – draped over his shoulders, glass of beer in hand; another shows the maverick fascist bungee jumping off a bridge.

Behind the scenes, functionaries and volunteers have been working around the clock sending invitations. Austria’s political elite are expected to attend tomorrow. But the 50,000 mourners are also expected to include Belgian nationalist Filip Dewinter, French extremist Jean-Marie le Pen, Alessandra Mussolini, the granddaughter of the Italian wartime fascist leader, Umberto Bossi from Italy’s Northern League, Swiss industrialist Christoph Blocher, and a handful of Waffen-SS veterans, whom Haider once described as “men of character”. Younger far-right figures have also hinted they will turn up, though Austrian intelligence is on alert to turn away groups of skinheads or neo-fascists, to stop the event turning into a rally.

With state broadcaster ORF planning live coverage, President Heinz Fischer, who will give the main speech, and other politicians have asked for assurances that they will not appear in the same frames as anyone from the far right. “They realise it could get very embarrassing,” says Hans Rauscher, veteran writer for Der Standard newspaper.

The fear gripping the elite shows the extent to which Haider managed to impose himself on Austria’s political scene, becoming a figurehead for an array of far-right European groups. Particularly at such a sensitive economic moment, when parallels with 1929 and the great depression are drawn every day, the fear is that the extreme right may seek to exploit the symbolic power of such a gathering.

“The possibilities for a rise of the far right in the light of the financial and economic crisis are there,” warns Anton Pelinka, professor of politics at the Central European University in Budapest and author of The Haider Phenomenon.

In fact the extreme right is already in the ascendant in several European countries. In Italy the Northern League is enjoying its place in Silvio Berlusconi’s ruling coalition. Blocher’s Swiss People’s party is the biggest political force in the country, Belgium’s Vlaams Belang maintains its strength in Flanders, while in Denmark Pia Kjærsgaard’s anti-immigrant Danish People’s party is the third largest in the parliament. Racism has risen in Europe in recent years, with polls showing widespread antisemitism and anti-Muslim sentiment.

But the far right does not seem to be finding it any easier to work together. “In the European parliament there’s a strong incentive to do this – if you establish a party group you get funds and more opportunities,” Pelinka says. “But the far-right parties have contradicting nationalistic narratives and this makes it very difficult to form one group.”

“Denmark and the Netherlands suffered under the Nazis so their far-right groups would never consider joining forces with far-right groups from Austria and Germany,” says Richard Brem, editor in chief of a Vienna-based online youth culture magazine. The same goes for the far-right movements of Poland and the Czech Republic. Like Bossi and Blocher, the Netherlands’ late Pim Fortuyn might well have seen the well-dressed, perma-tanned Haider as a visual model for his own brand of populist politics, but in fact they had little in common beyond their anti-immigrant rhetoric. Fortuyn, who was openly gay, saw himself as a libertarian whose rights were being curtailed by the immigrant Muslim population. Haider’s ethos grew out of an old-time fascism, his country’s Nazi past and a psychological need to defend the Nazi generation – including his parents – who he thought were unjustly treated after the war.

“Official Austrian state doctrine after the war was that the Allies liberated Austria from Nazi Germany in 1945 and that Austria had been a victim of the Nazis in 1938,” says Pelinka. “This overlooks the fact that the percentage of Austrians who participated in the Nazi regime was the same as in Germany. In contrast, Germany was forced to confront its past directly and did so. Austria was not and didn’t.”

In Germany, Haider – famous for his outbursts lauding SS veterans, his description of Austria as an “ideological miscarriage”, his labelling of Nazi death camps as “punishment camps” and admiration for the Third Reich’s “sensible employment policies” – could never have achieved the same success.

Haider himself was frustrated in his attempts to form a pan-European far-right club, though he was successful at least in his intention of provoking European leaders after they slapped sanctions on Austria following the electoral success of his Freedom party (FPO) in 2000.

Nonetheless he is credited with having injected new life into far-right politics. “He was one of the first in Europe to grasp that it’s not about issues or a rational discourse, but about emotion,” says Brem. “He understood that politics was about marketing and you need to be marketing savvy to succeed.”

“What Haider did was to bring Austria’s SS and Nazi history out of the past and put it in the present and because he was such a charismatic politician he got away with it,” says Rauscher. “But his lasting legacy is the way that he poisoned the political atmosphere in Austria in the process.”

Throughout Carinthia there is hardly a person who says Haider has not shaken their hand, or bought them a schnapps. Others talk of receiving €100 handouts from him, a campaign which earned him the nickname “Robin Hood”, or speak of the time he lowered petrol prices and introduced free kindergartens.

In the Pumpe pub on Benediktiner Platz in Klagenfurt, drinkers sit around whispering about how Haider died. The figure “142″ is repeated often. That is the speed (in kilometres an hour) at which he was driving when he crashed his VW Phaeton on Saturday night. The news has by now filtered down that he was drunk at the wheel.

“Some say he was criminal because he was drunk, but that’s an insult,” says Christa, a 17-year-old who was among the country’s new young voters (the voting age is 16), who gave her support to Haider’s BZO in elections two weeks ago. “He did so much for everyone.”

Does she think he belittled national socialism? “Well, I don’t really know what that is,” she replies. “If you mean, was he right to lock up foreigners, yes, because people with a criminal tendency have no place here.”

The “Lady Di” comparison is repeated often, along with references to James Dean, Austrian rock star Falco and even the Dalai Lama (”for his ability to reach out to everyone”, says one man). Many voice their suspicion that Haider was in fact murdered by Mossad, despite the scientific tests that show he was several times over the alcohol limit.

The television newsreader who announced his death ended her report with the message: “Dear Carinthians, I wish you as much strength as you need to get through this,” while Haider’s right-hand man Stefan Petzner, the new leader of the BZO, said the “sun has fallen from the sky”.

“It’s not, it’s still there,” says Carinthian writer Egyd Gstättner, who observed Haider for two decades. He talks in disgust of a “führer cult” surrounding Haider. On Monday morning, like every Carinthian schoolchild, his 10-year-old daughter was told by her religious affairs teacher to fill up a page of her exercise book with a black cross and Haider’s name.

One of Haider’s last acts was the establishment of what he called a sonderlager – a special camp for old, sick, and criminal asylum seekers, set on an isolated, 1,200-metre-high alpine pasture. He told his voters he planned to “concentrate” Chechens there, enabling the “final goal” of their extradition to be carried out more smoothly. In other countries politicians would be forced to resign over such issues. According to Florian Klenk, deputy editor of news magazine Falter, “In Austria the typical reaction was, “Well, that’s just Haider. And actually he’s right.”

Last month he won 10% of the vote in national elections, following his victory in Carinthian elections last March.

Commentators suggest it is too early to predict the effect Haider’s death may have on far-right politics in Austria. Heinz-Christian Strache, his former ally and more hardline successor as leader of the FPO, has not ruled out a merger with Haider’s BZO. That would give the combined far-right parties the same strength they had when Austria was ostracised for that very reason eight years ago.

Today’s gathering might well set alarm bells ringing that Europe’s extreme right is gathering steam at a time of economic turmoil. “Strache, Bossi and Le Pen will do everything to exploit the crisis,” says Pelinka. “And they will have some success. But at the moment there is no indication that they can and will be able to get the amount of power Mussolini, Hitler and co enjoyed in the interwar period.”

But the real test, Pelinka says, will come if the economic situation worsens and unemployment rises. He will be watching to see the extent to which countries such as Germany – whose high unemployment in the 1930s led to the rise of Hitler – have really changed. “The question is whether we can assume that in the decades since 1945 countries like Austria, Germany and Italy have been able to create a different, more stable democratic political culture.”

Related

Volkswagen: Austria`s Haider Was Killed

Austrian policemen stand next to the wreckage of the car of the leader of Austria’s Buendnis Zukunft Oesterreich (BZOe) party (Alliance for Austria’s future) Joerg Haider in the village of Lambichl, near the Carinthian capital Klagenfurt, October 11, 2008.

Car may have been tampered with

JAVNO | Oct 17, 2008

The Phaeton is the safest of all. You`d need the key to manipulate the electronics, Volkswagen spokesperson claims.

Although Austrian investigators claimed that right-wing leader Joerg Haider was drunk during the tragic accident, Volkswagen decided to hire their own experts to see if there is a possibility that the politician was killed.

Peter Thul, Volkswagen spokesperson, claims that electronic features could have been tampered with on the car Haider was driving.

The Volkswagen Phaeton was constructed to overcome the curve Haider speeded off and died.

- The Phaeton and Audi A8 are the safest of all. You’d need the key to manipulate the electronics, so someone at a garage would have to tamper with it – Thul said.

The Austrian right-wing leader`s accident was compared to the death of Princess Diana.

Weapons inspector’s closest female friend explains why he COULDN’T have killed himself

‘He couldn’t cut a steak’: Mai pederson is unconvinced David Kelly took his own life

Daily Mail | Aug 31, 2008

By  Sharon Churcher

A female confidante of Dr David Kelly raised disturbing new questions last night over how the Ministry of Defence weapons inspector was able to kill himself.

After his body was discovered in woods near his Oxfordshire home in July 2003, a Government inquiry led by Lord Hutton ruled that he committed suicide by slashing his left wrist with a knife and taking an overdose of co-proxamol, a painkiller commonly used for arthritis.

He was said to be anguished about being named as the source of a BBC report, which alleged that Tony Blair ‘sexed up’ a dossier justifying the invasion of Iraq.

Mystery death: Professor David Kelly appearing at the House of Commons during the Iraq inquiry.  Kelly gave evidence during an inquiry into whether the Government had ’sexed up’ the reasons for going to war with Iraq

But five years after his death at 59, his close friend, American military linguist Mai Pederson, has come forward to dispute this account.

The Hutton inquiry heard that he died after making several cuts to his left wrist, which severed the ulnar artery, buried deep in the tissue on the side of the hand nearest the little finger.

An earlier coroner’s inquest was halted when the Government used an obscure law to turn the investigation over to Lord Hutton. His inquiry concluded that ‘there was no involvement by a third party’ in the scientist’s death, which was said to be caused primarily by the cut artery and hastened by the painkillers.

Ms Pederson, a US Air Force officer, met Dr Kelly when she was assigned to work in 1998 as a translator for the UN weapons inspection team in Iraq.

And she revealed in an interview with The Mail on Sunday that, in the months leading to his death, the right-handed scientist was unable to use his right hand for tasks requiring strength because of a painful injury to his right elbow.

According to Ms Pederson, when she dined with Dr Kelly at a Washington restaurant in the spring of 2003, the hand’s grip was so weak that he struggled to get a knife through a steak he had ordered.

The linguist, who counselled Dr Kelly during his conversion to the Baha’i religious faith that she follows, says he had begun to favour his left hand for even relatively minor tasks, a tendency she observed on numerous other occasions.

‘David would have had to have been a contortionist to kill himself the way they claim,’ she said.

‘I don’t know whether he was born right-handed but by the time I first met him he favoured his left hand for any task that required strength, like opening a door or carrying his briefcase.

‘When he embraced friends at the beginning and end of Baha’i meetings, it was his left arm that you felt hugging you and you could tell his right arm hurt him because he rubbed the elbow a lot.

‘I didn’t want to pry but he finally told me the reason in the spring of 2003. It was the last time I saw him before he died. He was visiting America on business and we went out to dinner.

‘He ordered steak and he was holding his knife very oddly in the palm of his right hand, with his wrist crooked, trying to cut the meat.

‘He told me that some time ago he had broken his right elbow and it was never fixed properly, so he had real problems with it. It was painful and it never regained its strength.

‘I just don’t see how he could have used his right hand to cut through the nerves and tendons of his left wrist – especially as the knife he supposedly used had a dull blade.’

Ms Pederson said she believed she was familiar with the knife Dr Kelly is said to have used.

‘He always wore a Barbour jacket and he kept a knife in his pocket,’ she said. ‘It had a folding blade and I remember him telling me he couldn’t sharpen it because his right hand didn’t have the strength to hold a sharpener.

‘It would have taken him a long time to reach the artery that was severed and it would have been very painful.

‘As a scientist, David had no need to kill himself that way. I don’t understand why the British Government isn’t thoroughly investigating this. Logically, he cannot have committed suicide.’

Ms Pederson, 48, whose military duties have included intelligence assignments, has avoided the spotlight since Dr Kelly’s death. But she says she is perturbed by mounting evidence that he may have been murdered.

The Mail on Sunday revealed last week that after his disappearance, a heat-seeking search helicopter flew over the exact spot where his corpse was later discovered. Yet the thermal-imaging equipment picked up no sign of a body – which some experts say suggests he was killed elsewhere.

Moreover, a group of doctors, surgeons and anaesthetists has called for a new inquiry into his death, contending that a cut to the ulnar artery would not cause catastrophic bleeding. Little blood was found at the scene.

They also maintain that the 29 or so painkillers Dr Kelly supposedly swallowed were only one-third of the dosage normally considered as lethal.

Even more mysteriously, there were no fingerprints on the knife he allegedly wielded nor on the bottle from which he supposedly drank water to wash down the tablets.

But perhaps most key is the information that Ms Pederson provided to Thames Valley Police, who were assisting the Hutton inquiry.

When officers flew to meet her in America in August 2003, she says she told them during two days of interviews that she was baffled about how Dr Kelly could have killed himself.

‘The facts just don’t add up,’ said Ms Pederson. ‘The more I have heard about this, the more I have thought about the significance of his weak right hand. I told the police about it when they interviewed me. I said, “How could David have cut his left wrist using a dull knife with his weak right hand?”

‘They said, “It wasn’t a straight cut. It was jagged.”

‘When I heard nothing more about it, I assumed they had come to an informed decision – that it was suicide. But now, knowing all that we do, I feel it is time for a disinterested public inquiry.’

Ms Pederson has been one of the more elusive figures in the mystery of Dr Kelly’s death. There have been rumours that she might have been romantically involved with the married scientist.

However, the vivacious brunette strongly denied this in a previous interview with The Mail on Sunday, pointing out that both her religion and military rules prohibit adultery.

Ms Pederson, who is fluent in Arabic, German and French, met Dr Kelly when she was seconded to the UN team in Iraq as a translator. In the tense atmosphere, she developed a close bond with him. They had long conversations about her devout beliefs in the ecumenical teachings of the Baha’i faith, to which he converted a year later.

She recalled: ‘He was like my big brother. I was the only linguist on the team and I would work until 11 or 11.30 at night and then go for a walk to get rid of the stress and the pressure. Other team members would walk with me but eventually it was mostly David because of his British passion for his daily constitutional.

‘The only time it was safe to talk about anything important was when we were walking. At our hotel, the Iraqis monitored us. The only place to change our underwear and not be filmed by their surveillance equipment was behind the shower curtains in our rooms.

‘The desk clerk at the hotel constantly called me, saying he was enamoured by me. I later discovered he was a lieutenant in the Iraqi military and I think it was a clumsy effort to elicit information from me.

‘One night, a group of us were out walking and suddenly a red laser shone out. It went from David’s heart to his head and it pretty much stayed on the middle of his forehead.

‘The inspectors said it happened all the time. The idea was to intimidate David, showing they could pick him out as a target even in the dark.’

Enraged, Ms Pederson insisted that the Russian inspector heading the team complain to General Amer Al-Saadi, Saddam Hussein’s British-educated weapons adviser.

‘The general said it was children playing,’ she said derisively. ‘The other thing that bothered me was that key people on the team were constantly getting sick.

‘The symptoms were very similar to anthrax. We joked that they were poisoning us so we couldn’t finish our job. David pretty much lived on Vegemite and bread.’

After Ms Pederson returned to America, she was stationed at the Defence Language Institute in California. It has been described as a spy school but she says she worked as a personnel officer. The US Air Force often sent her on assignments that required a linguist, which she is not permitted to discuss.

She met Dr Kelly again after she was transferred to the Pentagon. ‘It was October 2002 and he was visiting Washington,’ she said. ‘He told me that the Iraqis had drawn up a hit list of people to be killed.

‘He said, “I am number three and you also are on it.” At the time, it didn’t really bother either of us. We understood there was a danger because of our jobs.

‘He also told me that if we invaded Iraq, he would be found dead in the woods. He loved to walk in the woods near his home. But he knew that walking alone made him vulnerable. The Iraqis wanted him dead.’

In May 2003, journalist Andrew Gilligan reported on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that a source had disclosed that the Blair administration had ‘sexed up’ the dossier, accusing Saddam of harbouring weapons of mass destruction.

Dr Kelly was subsequently named as the source and the Hutton inquiry concluded that this plunged him into depression

Ms Pederson concedes that he was ‘upset’ by the episode but says that he brushed it off, insisting he had been misquoted.

And far from being opposed to the Government’s dossier, she says he was convinced that Saddam lied when he told the UN that he was no longer developing WMDs.

She said: ‘David believed the Iraqis were not being forthcoming during our inspections about their potential for making weapons. If they weren’t up to anything, why did we have to be accompanied by minders? And why were people scared to talk to us?

‘David’s position on the invasion was that it was regrettable but necessary because UN sanctions had failed. He said he was misquoted and his words were twisted and taken out of context.

‘He wasn’t depressed. He was upset. I have taken courses on suicide prevention and he exhibited none of the signs.

‘He was planning for his retirement. He wanted to make more money to provide for his family and he’d had job offers in the States as well as Europe. Also, he was excited that one of his daughters was getting married. He said, “The controversy will blow over.” ’

Ms Pederson claims that at the time of his death, Dr Kelly was looking forward to returning to Iraq. ‘Had he been alive, he finally would have been free to look for evidence of WMDs,’ she said. ‘If anyone could have found them, it would have been David.

‘I am not saying that the Iraqis killed him. But that is one possibility that should be investigated. All the facts suggest that David did not kill himself. It is against our Baha’i faith.

‘But for David there were also personal reasons – he believed his mother’s death was suicide. Research shows that suicide runs in families and I asked him if he would ever do that. I said, “Hypothetically, if you are ever at your wit’s end, promise me that you will seek help.”

‘He said, “I don’t see the relevance. I would never take any life, let alone my own.” He finally did say that if he was ever desperate, he would get help. That’s important because he was a man of his word. He could never hurt his wife and daughters the way that he was hurt by his mother’s death.’

Ms Pederson’s Washington DC lawyer, Mark Zaid, has made available to The Mail on Sunday parts of her final statement to Thames Valley Police, given on September 1, 2003.

A red rose lies on the David Kelly’s grave. But the story behind his death is not yet ready to rest in peace

Its ten pages would appear critical, since they describe Iraqi death threats and the incident with the laser. She also stated that she was bewildered about how Dr Kelly could have taken an overdose, as he suffered from a disorder that made it difficult for him to swallow pills.

‘I was so confused when I heard he had swallowed a load of painkillers,’ she told the officers.

She also emphasised in the statement that he suffered from pain and problems ‘grabbing things with his right hand, which he attributed to breaking his elbow’.

Police have implied that she did not give them permission to give her statement to the Hutton inquiry. But in fact she stipulated: ‘If specific information [in the statement] is deemed relevant to the coroner’s inquiry into the death of David Kelly, I am willing for Thames Valley to reveal the information in a non-attributable way.’

However, her statement was never given to the inquiry. The then Assistant Chief Constable of Thames Valley Police, Michael Page, testified that it ‘contained nothing of relevance’.

After the inquiry, Ms Pederson started to get death threats. ‘Some were from nuts,’ she said. But others, she believes, may have been related to her sensitive work with Dr Kelly in Iraq. And she spoke on condition that we do not reveal her whereabouts.

‘I can’t say for sure that David was murdered,’ she said. ‘But his life had been threatened because he strived to do what was best for humanity.

‘He deserved more from his country than an investigation that overlooked the fact that his right hand was so weak that he had problems cutting a piece of steak.’

Colleagues question official story about dead anthrax scientist

Ivins Could Not Have Been Attacker, Some Say

Colleagues and friends of the vaccine specialist remained convinced that Ivins was innocent

Washington Post | Aug 3, 2008

Scientists Question FBI Probe On Anthrax

By Joby Warrick, Marilyn W. Thompson and Aaron C. Davis

For nearly seven years, scientist Bruce E. Ivins and a small circle of fellow anthrax specialists at Fort Detrick’s Army medical lab lived in a curious limbo: They served as occasional consultants for the FBI in the investigation of the deadly 2001 anthrax attacks, yet they were all potential suspects.

Over lunch in the bacteriology division, nervous scientists would share stories about their latest unpleasant encounters with the FBI and ponder whether they should hire criminal defense lawyers, according to one of Ivins’s former supervisors. In tactics that the researchers considered heavy-handed and often threatening, they were interviewed and polygraphed as early as 2002, and reinterviewed numerous times. Their labs were searched, and their computers and equipment carted away.

The FBI eventually focused on Ivins, whom federal prosecutors were planning to indict when he committed suicide last week. In interviews yesterday, knowledgeable officials asserted that Ivins had the skills and access to equipment needed to turn anthrax bacteria into an ultra-fine powder that could be used as a lethal weapon. Court documents and tapes also reveal a therapist’s deep concern that Ivins, 62, was homicidal and obsessed with the notion of revenge.

Yet, colleagues and friends of the vaccine specialist remained convinced that Ivins was innocent: They contended that he had neither the motive nor the means to create the fine, lethal powder that was sent by mail to news outlets and congressional offices in the late summer and fall of 2001. Mindful of previous FBI mistakes in fingering others in the case, many are deeply skeptical that the bureau has gotten it right this time.

“I really don’t think he’s the guy. I say to the FBI, ‘Show me your evidence,’ ” said Jeffrey J. Adamovicz, former director of the bacteriology division at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases, or USAMRIID, on the grounds of the sprawling Army fort in Frederick. “A lot of the tactics they used were designed to isolate him from his support. The FBI just continued to push his buttons.”

Investigators are so confident of Ivins’s involvement that they have been debating since Friday whether and how to close the seven-year-old anthrax investigation. That would involve disbanding a grand jury in the District and unsealing scores of documents that form the basis of the government’s case against Ivins.

Negotiations over the legal issues continue, but a government source said that the probe could be shuttered as early as tomorrow. The move would amount to a strong signal that the FBI and Justice Department think they got their man — and that he is dead, foreclosing the possibility of a prosecution. No charges are likely against others, that source added.

Once the case is closed, the FBI and Justice Department will face questions — and possibly public hearings — from congressional oversight committees, which have been largely shut out of the case the past five years. The investigators have cited the ongoing nature of the case, as well as accusations of leaks to the media, for the information blackout to Capitol Hill.

One bioweapons expert familiar with the FBI investigation said Ivins indeed possessed the skills needed to create the dust-fine powder used in the attacks. At the Army lab where he worked, Ivins specialized in making sophisticated preparations of anthrax bacteria spores for use in animal tests, said the expert, who requested anonymity because the investigation remains active.

Ivins’s daily routine included the use of processes and equipment the anthrax terrorist likely used in making his weapons. He also is known to have had ready access to the specific strain of Bacillus anthracis used in the attack — a strain found to match samples found in Ivins’s lab, he said.

“You could make it in a week,” the expert said. “And you could leave USAMRIID with nothing more than a couple of vials. Bear in mind, they weren’t exactly doing body searches of scientists back then.”

But others, including former colleagues and scientists with backgrounds in biological weapons defense, disagreed that Ivins could have created the anthrax powder, even if he were motivated to do so.

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