David Kelly (weapons expert)

David Christopher Kelly (14 May 1944 – 17 July 2003) was a Welsh scientist and authority on biological warfare (BW).

David Christopher Kelly was born in Llwynypia, Glamorgan, South Wales, on 14 May 1944.

His parents were Thomas John Kelly and Margaret, Williams; Thomas was a schoolteacher who was serving in the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve as a signals officer during the Second World War.

Thomas and Margaret divorced in 1951; she took their young son and moved in with her parents in Pontypridd.

From the age of eleven he attended the local grammar school.

He was a keen sportsman and musician at school, and represented Wales in the youth cross-country running team; he played double bass in the National Youth Orchestra of Wales and played the saxophone to a high standard.

In 1963 Kelly was admitted to the University of Leeds to study chemistry, botany and biophysics.

His mother died two years later from an overdose of prescription barbiturates.

Although the coroner's inquest gave an open verdict, Kelly believed she had killed herself.

As a result of the death, Kelly suffered from insomnia and was prescribed sleeping pills; he was also given an extra year to complete his degree.

He graduated in 1967 with a BSc in bacteriology; he then obtained an MSc in virology from the University of Birmingham.

Between his first and second degrees, on 15 July 1967, he married Janice, Vawdrey, who was studying at Bingley Teacher Training College.

Kelly joined the Insect Pathology Unit at the University of Oxford in 1968, while a student of Linacre College.

In the early 1970s he undertook postdoctoral research at the University of Warwick, before moving back to Oxford in the mid-1970s to work at the Institute of Virology and Environmental Microbiology.

There he carried out virology research into pests such as Spodoptera and Aedes.

He rose to the position of Chief Scientific Officer; much of his work was in the field of insect viruses.

In 1971 he received his doctorate in microbiology; his thesis was "The Replication of Some Iridescent Viruses in Cell Cultures".

In 1984 Kelly joined the Ministry of Defence (MoD) as the head of the Defence Microbiology Division working at Porton Down, Wiltshire.

The department had only a small number of microbiologists when he arrived, and most of their work involved the decontamination of Gruinard Island, which had been used during the Second World War for experiments with weaponised anthrax.

He increased the scope of his department, obtaining additional funding to undertake research into biodefence.

In 1989 Vladimir Pasechnik, the senior Soviet biologist and bioweapons developer, defected to the UK and provided intelligence about the clandestine biological warfare (BW) programme, Biopreparat.

A former head of the Defence Microbiology Division working at Porton Down, Kelly was part of a joint US-UK team that inspected civilian biotechnology facilities in Russia in the early 1990s and concluded they were running a covert and illegal BW programme.

Because of the work undertaken by Kelly and his team, the UK were able to deploy a biodefence capability during the 1990–1991 Gulf War.

He was appointed to the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) in 1991 as one of its chief weapons inspectors in Iraq and led ten of the organisation's missions between May 1991 and December 1998.

He also worked with UNSCOM's successor, the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) and led several of their missions into Iraq.

During his time with UNMOVIC he was key in uncovering the anthrax production programme at the Salman Pak facility, and a BW programme run at Al Hakum.

He was appointed as Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George (CMG) in 1994 and might well have been under consideration for a knighthood in May 2003, according to Hutton.

His work in Iraq earned him a nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize.

A year after the publication of the 2002 dossier on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction—which stated that some of Iraq's chemical and biological weapons were deployable within 45 minutes—Kelly had an off-the-record conversation with Andrew Gilligan, a BBC journalist, about the claim.

When Gilligan reported this on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, he stated that the "45 minutes" claim was included at the insistence of Alastair Campbell, the Downing Street Director of Communications; Kelly denied that he said Campbell had forced in the reference.

The government complained to the BBC about the claim, but they refused to recant on it; political tumult between Downing Street and the BBC developed.

Kelly informed his line managers in the Ministry of Defence that he might have been the source, but did not think he was the only one, as Gilligan had reported points he had not mentioned.

Kelly's name became known to the media, and he was called to appear on 15 July before the parliamentary Intelligence and Security and Foreign Affairs select committees.

Two days later Kelly was found dead near his home, having killed himself.

Following Kelly's suicide Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, set up a government inquiry under Lord Hutton, a former Lord Chief Justice of Northern Ireland.

The inquiry concluded that Kelly had killed himself.

Hutton also stated that no other parties were involved in Kelly's death.

There was continued debate over the manner of Kelly's death, and the case was reviewed between 2010 and 2011 by Dominic Grieve, the Attorney General; he concluded that there was "overwhelmingly strong" evidence that Kelly had killed himself.

The post-mortem and toxicology reports were released in 2010; both documents supported the conclusion of the Hutton Inquiry.

The manner of Kelly's death has been the subject of several documentaries and has been fictionalised on television, on stage and in print.