It is the cruellest irony that the first human casualty of the altercation between the press office at Number 10 Downing Street and the BBC should be the man closest to the facts on Iraq’s biological warfare capability. It is now clear that David Kelly, a senior adviser to the Ministry of Defence Director of Counter Proliferation and Arms Control, took his own life in woodland not far from his Oxfordshire home. This followed an appearance before the Parliamentary Foreign Affairs Committee three days earlier, when at least one member chose to try to humiliate him.
Kelly led the first team of United Nations biological weapons investigators to Iraq in 1991, following the end of the first Gulf War and Saddam Hussein’s acceptance under the