Crowd-funders raise £60k to probe David Kelly mystery

The strange death of Dr David Kelly, the Government weapons inspector found in a wood in Oxfordshire, remains an enduring mystery.

Now former MP George Galloway has successfully crowd-funded more than £60,000 to make a film about the case. he has spent the past few months on his own investigation, called Killing Kelly, and tells me the project is close to completion.

‘Among important contributions is one from Andrew Mackinlay, the former Labour MP, who has never discussed his role in the affair before,’ says Galloway.

Kelly is believed to have committed suicide in 2003 after being revealed as the source for the claim that the government had ‘sexed up’ a dossier on WMDs to justify the war in Iraq.

Mackinlay questioned Kelly at a parliamentary select committee hearing which supposedly tipped him over the edge. ‘I reckon you are chaff,’ Mackinlay told Kelly a few days before he died. ‘You have been thrown up to divert our probing. have you ever felt like a fall guy? You have been set up, have you not?’

The 2003 tragedy led to the hutton Inquiry, but for many people urgent questions about the murky episode remain.

‘We were filming on harrowdown

hill recently,’ says Galloway. ‘It’s the place where Dr Kelly’s body was found. I’m not persuaded yet it’s where he died, but the fact he was found there gave it a haunting quality, especially when the jackdaws and crows were croaking as we filmed. It was a little spooky, I must say.’

Those sceptical of hutton’s finding, that Dr Kelly took his own life, point out that successive governments refused to hold a full coroner’s inquest into Dr Kelly’s death. This means nobody has ever been questioned under oath about it.

‘After all these years, the Kelly affair still has a chilling effect,’ says Galloway.