David Kelly (weapons Expert) - Hutton Inquiry

Hutton Inquiry

The government immediately announced that Lord Hutton would lead the judicial Hutton Inquiry into the events leading up to the death. The BBC shortly afterwards confirmed that Kelly had indeed been the single source for Andrew Gilligan's report. The inquiry took priority over an inquest, which would normally be required into a suspicious death. The Oxfordshire coroner, Nicholas Gardiner, considered the issue again in March 2004. After reviewing evidence not presented to the Hutton Inquiry, Gardiner decided there was no need for further investigation. This conclusion did not satisfy those who had raised doubts, but there has been no alternative official explanation for Kelly's death. The Hutton Inquiry reported on 28 January 2004 that Kelly had committed suicide. Lord Hutton wrote:

I am satisfied that none of the persons whose decisions and actions I later describe ever contemplated that Kelly might take his own life. I am further satisfied that none of those persons was at fault in not contemplating that Kelly might take his own life. Whatever pressures and strains Kelly was subjected to by the decisions and actions taken in the weeks before his death, I am satisfied that no one realised or should have realised that those pressures and strains might drive him to take his own life or contribute to his decision to do so.

Hutton concluded that the Ministry of Defence was obliged to make Kelly's identity known once he came forward as a potential source, and had not acted in a duplicitous manner. Hutton criticised the MoD for not having alerted Kelly to the fact that his name had become known to the press.

During the inquiry, a British ambassador called David Broucher reported a conversation with Kelly at a Geneva meeting in February 2003. Broucher related that Kelly said he had assured his Iraqi sources that there would be no war if they co-operated, and that a war would put him in an "ambiguous" moral position. Broucher had asked Kelly what would happen if Iraq were invaded, and Kelly had replied, "I will probably be found dead in the woods." Broucher then quoted from an email he had sent just after Kelly's death: "I did not think much of this at the time, taking it to be a hint that the Iraqis might try to take revenge against him, something that did not seem at all fanciful then. I now see that he may have been thinking on rather different lines." According to an entry in one of Kelly’s diaries, discovered afterwards by his daughter Rachel at his home, this meeting did not take place in February 2003, but in February 2002. According to Kelly’s half-sister, Sarah Pape, the day after his daughter Ellen’s wedding on Saturday 22 February 2003, he flew out to New York. Pape told the inquiry, "he certainly did not mention he was going to be flying almost straight back to visit Geneva."