Fact check
Is it true: David Kelly death (Jul 17 2003, Oxfordshire)?
There's no solid evidence for it.
Claim: Kelly did not kill himself; he was murdered and the Hutton finding concealed it. Not supported. Hutton (January 2004) found he took his own life, the principal cause being bleeding from incised wounds to his left wrist, and that no other person was involved. The post-mortem report, which Hutton had asked be withheld for 70 years, was published with the toxicology report in October 2010 and described the wrist wounds as typical of self-inflicted injury. In June 2011 Attorney General Dominic Grieve, after commissioning an independent forensic pathologist and a professor of toxicology, called the evidence of suicide "overwhelmingly strong" and said nothing supported murder or a cover-up. True sub-claim: no coroner's inquest was completed, and some doctors still dispute the medical conclusions. Unsupported: murder or cover-up, for which no alternative account has been established.
The claim
Dr David Kelly, the Ministry of Defence weapons expert named as the BBC's source for the claim that the Iraq WMD dossier had been "sexed up", did not take his own life in July 2003: he was murdered, and the Hutton Inquiry's suicide finding concealed that. Proponents include Norman Baker, whose 2007 book The Strange Death of David Kelly questioned the official investigation and, as the Guardian put it in 2013, said Kelly was most likely murdered, and doctors who have campaigned since 2004 for a full coroner's inquest and challenged the medical evidence. The doctors' own case is narrower (that the cause of death was not safely established); the murder claim goes further.
Key evidence
Medical challenge: ulnar artery alone unlikely to cause fatal blood loss
Hutton Inquiry ruled suicide: bleeding from wrist wounds the principal cause; no other person involved
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