Death of MI6 spy Williams, whose body was in a padlocked sports bag, was probably an accident.

[Are_grits_groceries]

<snip>
Mr Williams's body was found naked at his flat in Pimlico on 23 August 2010 after colleagues raised concerns for his welfare.

He had been on a secondment with MI6 from his job as a communications officer at the GCHQ "listening post" in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire.

The reality is that for both hypotheses, there exist evidential contradictions and gaps in our understanding”.

Police discovered his body inside a zipped-up red sports holdall, in the empty bath of his bathroom.

It had taken a week for MI6 to investigate the code-breaker's disappearance, and a post-mortem examination carried out by a Home Office pathologist failed to determine the cause of death.

During a seven-day inquest in May 2012, the question of whether Mr Williams could have padlocked himself into a bag in a bath was central.
<snip>
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-24927078#TWEET953525

Wait! Wut?!?
Is padlocking yourself INSIDE a sports bag now a spy skill that's taught?

[Heather MC]

1. Welp that's settled..

I am taking pad lock myself in a duffle bag off my Bucket list

[In_The_Wind]

2. Oh my

[Spider Jerusalem]

3. He was into "self-bondage" and "claustrophilia", apparently

He browsed self-bondage websites and sites about claustrophilia - the love of enclosure - on his computers and phone and was looking at fetish websites days before his death.

http://www.news.com.au/world/mi6-codebreaker-gareth-williams-probably-locked-himself-into-sports-bag/story-fndir2ev-1226544342931

[Are_grits_groceries]

5. So?

How did he die?
You don't die because you lock yourself in a sports bag. You die of dehydration or something.

Occam's razor

They are desperately hunting for zebras to explain how he died without anybody else present.

[Spider Jerusalem]

7. Suffocation, probably

if you're going to go to the trouble of stuffing some bloke into a sports bag while still alive...why do you leave him in his own flat where the body will be found by anyone who comes in? And it was demonstrated that it was quite possible to lock oneself in a similar bag in a similar fashion. This is something Scotland Yard investigated. (It's mentioned in the story I linked.)

[sibelian]

8. Because it's easier to pass it off as autoasphyxia?

There's a nice, tidy story, you see. Bodies bring questions. Catastrophic autoasphyxia brings titillation instead. It's got a lovely grisly irony to it that makes the death newsworthy and titillating and blurs the narrative and sidesteps any public discussion of the consequences of the death.

There's a theory for you. Sounds good, huh? I should write for movies.

[LuvNewcastle]

9. That's exactly what I was thinking.

GMTA and all.

[Spider Jerusalem]

10. Only if whoever did it knew of his proclivities.

Otherwise it's kind of unlikely. And given that he apparently had a penchant for self-bondage and being confined in tight spaces, that he did it himself and couldn't get out again seems rather the most likely explanation. He had previous with getting himself into situations he couldn't get out of:

In a statement read out earlier, Mr Williams' former landlady in Cheltenham said she once found him lying in his boxer shorts tied to his bedstead, in what she thought was a "sexually motivated" act.

Jennifer Elliot said he had shouted for help because he was unable to untie himself.

She said he claimed he wanted to see if he could free himself, but both she and her husband thought it was sexually motivated rather than an act of escapology.

He had been lying on his back with both hands and arms tied and was "very embarrassed and apologetic" after being cut free.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-17837869

[sibelian]

15. Proclivities! I wish I had proclivities.

All I've got is post-SSRI syndrome and a large bag of now entirely useless equipment. Bafwar.

Anyhow, I guess you're right...

[Are_grits_groceries]

11. Really?

You are going to tell me that a locked sports bag is airtight?
If that's true or even considered, let them put somebody in one and find out if they can breathe.
In addition, I believe the coroner would have mentioned that as a possibility even if that would not serve as an official ruling.

As far as why would he be left behind, I have no idea. It could mean something we have no clue about or maybe it's for shits and giggles in the Secret Squirrel world.

[Spider Jerusalem]

12. The coroner at the inquest said he probably would have died in 30 minutes from heat and lack of air.

[DetlefK]

4. Other way round is correct: Clothes in sports-bag, person outside.

Maybe he just mixed it up?

[LuvNewcastle]

6. Was he trying to do some Houdini act?

I don't even think Houdini could've locked himself in a sports bag.

[MinM]

13. Dead Codebreaker Was Linked to NSA Intercept Case | Threat Level | Wired.com

It's worth remembering that Gareth Williams worked on some very sensitive cases..

...Williams flew up to four times a year to the U.S. to the NSA’s headquarters at Fort Meade HQ, according to the Mirror. His uncle, Michael Hughes, told the paper that Williams would mysteriously disappear for three or four weeks.

“The trips were very hush-hush,” Hughes said. “They were so secret that I only recently found out about them – and we’re a very close family. It had become part of his job in the past few years. His last trip out there was a few weeks ago, but he was regularly back and forth.”

Williams was said to have worked with the NSA on e-mails intercepted between Abdullah Ahmed Ali and Assad Sarwar and Rashid Rauf, a British national in Pakistan who was allegedly director of European operations for al Qaeda. The e-mails, intercepted by the NSA in 2006, allegedly contained coded messages.

The NSA shared the e-mails with British prosecutors but wouldn’t allow them to use the evidence in an early trial of the suspects out of fear of tipping off Rauf that he was under surveillance. It was only after Rauf was reportedly killed in a U.S. drone attack that the NSA allowed prosecutors to use the e-mails to convict the other suspects. It’s never been known whether the NSA intercepted the messages overseas or siphoned them as they passed through internet nodes on U.S. soil as part of the NSA’s controversial and unconstitutional warrantless wiretapping program...

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/08/codebreaker-death/

Also worth noting that he was found inside this bag...


With that lock on it.

[Are_grits_groceries]

14. I'd like to see the reenactment of this stunt.

I want to know and see how it was possible with that bag. I don't want some bag with 'small changes'. I want them to use an exact replica of that model.

[Madam45for2923]

16. So this is new news as I'm hearing this person was aiding money laundering investigations