Britain's Robin Cook dies

2005-08-06 20:13

London - Former British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, an ally who became a critic of Prime Minister Tony Blair, has died, Scottish police announced on Saturday.

The former British foreign secretary Robin Cook was taken to hospital in "serious condition" on Saturday after he collapsed whilst hiking in his native Scotland.

Cook, 59, was with a group near the summit of Ben Stack mountain in the Highlands when he collapsed, they said. He was taken to a hospital near Inverness by helicopter after a call to the coastguard.

Few further details were immediately available, but BBC News 24 quoted a senior Scottish political source as saying that Cook was "seriously ill". It also said that he was given cardiopulmonary resuscitation.

Without naming Cook, an official of the Maritime and Coastguard Agency told AFP that a Sikorsky air-sea rescue helicopter was sent to Ben Stack to pick up "a collapsed walker".

Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott, standing in for Prime Minister Tony Blair who departed on Saturday for a holiday abroad, was to make a statement later on Saturday evening, BBC News 24 said.

Cook, foreign secretary under Blair from 1997 to 2001, resigned from Blair's government - in which he was House of Commons leader, in charge of the legislative agenda - in March 2003 protest over the Iraq war.

During his four years at the Foreign Office, Cook forged an "ethical" foreign policy for Britain, and supported Nato's intervention in Kosovo in 1999 to wrest the mainly ethnic Albanian province from Serbian repression.

But he chose to resign Blair's government two days before the US and British invasion that led to Saddam Hussein's downfall, telling parliament: "I cannot support a war without international agreement or domestic support."

He won re-election in his central Scotland constituency of Livingstone in the May general election that put Blair and Labour back in power for a third straight term.

- AFP