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Kelly: UK press attacks BBC
21/07/2003 08:05 - (SA)
London - British newspapers rounded on the BBC on Monday after it owned up that dead British arms expert, David Kelly, was the sole source of its report that the government had "sexed up" evidence to justify war on Iraq.
The BBC turned down an offer, before Kelly was named in the affair, to end its row with the government, according to the Guardian daily.
The BBC blocked the compromise because it was determined to give no ground in its battle with Alastair Campbell, Prime Minister Tony Blair's director of communications and one of his closest aides, said The Guardian.
Campbell came out worst in a poll conducted for the Daily Telegraph, which showed that 65% of those asked felt he had gone down in their opinion since the affair.
Blair fell in the estimation of 59%, defence secretary Geoff Hoon 50% and the members of the parliamentary foreign affairs committee who grilled Kelly before his apparent suicide 56%, according to the YouGov survey.
Police said Kelly, whose body was found on Friday, bled to death after apparently slashing his own wrist. A knife and a packet of painkillers of the type often used in suicides were found near the body.
Under 'intolerable pressure'
Kelly, 59, was a ministry of defence consultant on biological weapons and a former United Nations arms inspector in Iraq.
His family said he had been under "intolerable pressure" after appearing before the committee.
Kelly denied being the source for the story, but admitted briefing Andrew Gilligan, the BBC defence correspondent whose report triggered the furore.
The BBC's defence of Gilligan's story and insistence that Kelly was its sole source means the corporation is effectively accusing the dead weapons expert of lying, said the Daily Mirror.
"Either Dr Kelly lied to MPs when he said he was not the main source or Mr Gilligan exaggerated his own report," said the tabloid.
The Sun, Britain's biggest-selling tabloid, also blasted Gilligan, labelling him a rat above the headline "BBC man sinks to new low by calling dead doc a liar."
The Financial Times said the BBC's concession that the scientist had been its principal source would help Blair to contain the worst political crisis of his career.
"Some want Campbell's head and some want a BBC head, preferably Gilligan's. But, without at least one head on a pole, to be jeered by the mob and made the subject of endless wise-after-the-event columns, there can be no closure," wrote Guardian columnist Jackie Ashley.
Former foreign secretary Robin Cook, who resigned from Blair's government about Iraq, called in The Independent newspaper for a judicial inquiry not only into Kelly's death, but also into the justification for the war.
"Britain also deserves a more-respectful political culture and a more-mature standard of political reporting," said Cook.
- AFP
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