Dr David Kelly,

a death that won’t be buried

From 1991, Dr David Kelly was one of the chief weapons inspectors with the UN in Iraq. He is seen leaving the House of Commons after giving evidence to the Foreign Affairs Select Committee in 2003. His body was found three days later. Johnny Green / PA Archive

July 10. 2010 It was Brock, a cross-border collie working with the civilian Lowland Search Dogs Association, who found the body, shortly after 8am on July 18, 2003. Slumped against a tree, not far from his home in the Oxfordshire countryside, lay one of the most surprising victims of the West’s invasion of Iraq.

Dr David Kelly, a weapons inspector at the centre of media allegations that the British government had “sexed up” the dossier it used to justify the invasion, had been missing since leaving his house for a walk the previous evening. He had become an unexpected casualty of the war he had worked to prevent, but which had nevertheless begun four months earlier.

His wife Janice had called the police just after midnight. Before dawn, dozens of officers, backed by a helicopter with heat-seeking equipment, were combing the woods near the couple’s home.

Kelly was found with his left wrist covered with blood. Beside him on the ground were a watch and a small knife.

But the supposed suicide of a man who held the key to the critical question of the aftermath of the Iraq war – how credible were the claims that Saddam had amassed an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction? – was the beginning of a mystery that for many was only deepened by an inquiry ordered by the then Labour government and conducted by Lord Hutton, a senior law lord. Continued