Police search Kelly's home

2003-07-19 13:36

Southmoor, England - Police searched the home of a weapons expert on Saturday for clues to a death which has plunged the Prime Minister Tony Blair's government deeper into controversy of the intelligence used to justify war in Iraq.

An eight-member police search team entered the home of former UN weapons inspector David Kelly on Saturday, a day after he was tentatively identified as the man found dead near a clump of woods outside the village. Some of the officers searched in Kelly's garden.

Police have not disclosed the cause of death.

Kelly, a Defence Ministry expert, was suspected of being the source of news reports that the government hyped a dossier on Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction.

His wife said he felt enormous pressure when he was called before a Parliamentary committee, where he denied that he was not the source the government was vigorously trying to smoke out.

Blair, appearing at a news conference on Saturday in Hakone, Japan with Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, stood rigid and stony-faced, but said nothing, when a journalist asked: "Have you got blood on your hands, prime minister? Are you going to resign over this?"

Earlier, Blair reminded reporters that he had ordered an inquiry, and "I think we should make our judgments when we get the facts."

Called before a Parliamentary committee on Tuesday, Kelly, a former UN weapons inspector in Iraq between 1991 and 1998, denied being the source of a British Broadcasting Corp's report that accused Blair's communications director of adding dubious claims to an intelligence dossier published in September.

Kelly's wife reportedly said he was stressed and "very, very angry" about being caught up in a public controversy.

Janice Kelly reported her husband missing on Thursday night when he failed to return from an afternoon walk. The body was found on Friday morning outside his village of Southmoor.

Kelly a 'fine servant'

Blair described Kelly as "a fine, public servant who did an immense amount of good for his country in the past, and I'm sure would have done so again in the future".

Opposition Conservative Party leader Iain Duncan Smith urged Blair to return to London. "There are very many questions that will need to be asked over the coming days," Duncan Smith said.

The death was a sensational development in a controversy threatening the government's credibility.

The big issue is whether the prime minister misled the country about Iraq's weapons. But recently the spotlight has been on a highly personal feud between Blair's communications chief, Alastair Campbell, and BBC journalist Andrew Gilligan.

A headline in The Independent on Saturday called Kelly "a casualty of war". The Daily Telegraph said "Death of the dossier fall guy", while the Daily Mail ran photos of Blair, Cambpell and Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon under the headline, "Proud of Yourselves?"

Call for Blair to resign

Labour lawmaker Glenda Jackson, a vehement critic of the war in Iraq, called for Blair to resign. "I don't see how the government is going to be able to function adequately," she said on Saturday in a radio interview.

The furor started with Gilligan's May 29 report that an unidentified intelligence source had said a government file on Iraq was "sexed up" to make a more convincing case for military action.

Gilligan quoted his source as saying the government insisted on including a claim that Iraq could deploy some chemical and biological weapons within 45 minutes, despite intelligence experts' doubts.

Gilligan later said his source had accused Campbell of insisting the claim be included.

Campbell denied that in testimony to the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, and demanded an apology from the BBC. Kelly told the committee on Tuesday that he had met Gilligan, but did not think he was the source of the BBC report.

Asked if he believed Campbell had interfered in drafting the dossier, the soft-spoken scientist responded: "I do not believe that at all."

Andrew Mackinlay, a legislator from Blair's Labour Party, asked Kelly if he felt he was the government's "fall guy".

"You have been set up, haven't you?" Mackinlay asked.

Kelly replied, "I accept the process that is happening."

The BBC refused to reveal its source. Hoon - Kelly's boss - said the weapons adviser had come forward to say he had had an unauthorised meeting with the BBC reporter and had not mentioned Campbell.

The BBC has not denied that, but did say that its source did not work for the Ministry of Defence.

Kelly, 59, an Oxford-educated microbiologist, had been the senior adviser to the Proliferation and Arms Control Secretariat in the Ministry of Defence for more than three years.

He was in Baghdad briefly in June where he met with troops involved in the weapons hunt. He was scheduled to return to Baghdad and take up a post with the Iraq Survey Group, a Pentagon-led effort taking over the search for suspected weapons of mass destruction. - Sapa-AP

- SAPA