UK police: Spy whose body was found in padlocked gym bag probably died by accident
Source: Associated Press
LONDON More than three years after the naked, decomposing body of British spy Gareth Williams was discovered stuffed inside a locked gym bag at the bottom of his bathtub, the mystery over his bizarre death lingers, and a police investigation has done little to clear it up.
Londons Metropolitan Police said Wednesday that their investigation had found that Williams likely died in an accident with no one else involved. But the tentative conclusion, which the police hedged by acknowledging many gaps havent been filled in, is unlikely to calm conspiracy theories surrounding the case.
Metropolitan Police Deputy Assistant Commissioner Martin Hewitt said Williams, whose remains were discovered in August 2010, was most probably killed in an accident, a verdict which conflicts with a coroners inquest that concluded last year that Williams was probably killed by another person in a criminally meditated act.
Hewitt said the police position is that, on balance, it is a more probable conclusion that there was no other person present when Gareth died.
Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/uk-police-spy-whose-body-was-found-in-padlocked-gym-bag-probably-died-by-accident/2013/11/13/3177f99c-4c53-11e3-bf60-c1ca136ae14a_story.html
dipsydoodle
(42,239 posts).
marble falls
(56,353 posts)billhicks76
(5,082 posts)This coming from the same UK police who covered up decades of pedophilia by high ranking politicians that made Jerry Sandusky look like a choir boy. There is no tranparancy in the UK and their surveillance/blackmail network was far ahead of us in sophistication for years. It's all about bribery and blackmail and offing those who may tell the truth. This gent worked in communications surveillance and was a listening post monitor. I wonder what he had the unfortunate bad luck to hear. This is what happens here too when an agency or government gets to tap every conversation we have. Truly frightening and evil in my opinion.
Jackpine Radical
(45,274 posts)Julius Caesar committed suicide by stabbing himself 33 times.
Kelvin Mace
(17,469 posts)repeatedly onto salad forks.
Abraham Lincoln died in a shaving mishap.
christx30
(6,241 posts)An explosive brain hemorrhage that removed a piece of his skull. It happens. My uncle's cousin's friend heard of it happening to one guy he knew.
Ian David
(69,059 posts)KansDem
(28,498 posts)truthisfreedom
(23,113 posts)Ian David
(69,059 posts)olddad56
(5,732 posts)Ian David
(69,059 posts)Mojorabbit
(16,020 posts)AtheistCrusader
(33,982 posts)Wadsworth: But, he was your second husband. Your first husband also disappeared.
Mrs. White: But that was his job. He was an illusionist.
Wadsworth: But he never reappeared!
Mrs. White: [admittedly] He wasn't a very good illusionist.
marble falls
(56,353 posts)Historic NY
(37,449 posts)louslobbs
(3,224 posts)it up and places a pad lock on it? Either that was one hell of a large gym bag or he was one hell of a small person.......now if he was a top magician with a phenomenal ability to contort his body.....uhhh.....I mean......if he was trying to see if he could top Houdini with an escape trick and stuffed himself inside a gym bag placed in a bath tub and then padlocked it.......ummmm?
What if he was planning a trip and wanted to save the plane fare for a friend to travel along and he was simply trying to find out if his friend would fit in the bag, but being a very intelligent person, he had determined from the onset, that he should try it out in the bath tub just in case he got stuck in the bag and if he did get stuck, he could still urinate without getting the floor wet (which would make a mess that he would later have to clean up), so if he did get stuck for any lengthy period of time, he could simply wait for his friend to come over and find him stuck in the locked gym bag in the bath tub and explain to his friend this great idea he had for saving money on travel that just didn't work out?
What if........what if? Let's say he didn't want anyone rummaging through his checked baggage at the airport and the most valuable thing he had to protect in life was obviously himself, so he used himself as the valuable thing that he wanted to protect to see if he could protect himself from himself if he was the person other than himself that was trying to get into the locked gym bag if it was checked baggage at the airport?
You know, I can't figure out how this happened, let alone that it happened accidentally. Also, where do you find a gym bag that large? My tennis bag is large enough to hold several tennis rackets and the smallest person I know still could not fit in the bag unless they were chopped up. Did it say whether he accidentally chopped himself up while he was in the pad locked gym bag? This would all make much more sense if it did.
Oh, I see now, no other person was present when he accidentally died, but maybe after he accidentally died, someone came over and stuffed his body in a gym bag, zipped it up, pad locked it, and placed it in the bath tub? I need more details. *sarcasm* just in case
Lou
1StrongBlackMan
(31,849 posts)A {insert the name of an old south state} Sheriff is called to a horrific scene ... A Black man, hanging from a tree by the neck. He had clearly been shot, stabbed before being set on fire.
The sheriff took one look and said, "Worst case of suicide I ever done seen."
jmowreader
(50,447 posts)Peace Patriot
(24,010 posts)Williams had recently qualified for operational deployment, and had worked with U.S. National Security Agency and FBI agents. The U.S. State Department asked that no details of Williams's work should emerge at the inquest. The Foreign Secretary, William Hague, signed a Public-interest immunity certificate authorising the withholding from the inquest of details of Williams's work and U.S. joint operations.[13]
No sign of forced entry could be found, but it was also noted that the door and locks had been removed by the time police experts had become involved.
The coroner was highly critical of the Metropolitan Police's Counter Terrorism Command (SO15), who failed to tell the senior investigating officer before the inquest began of the existence of nine memory sticks and other property in Williams's SIS office.
The coroner concluded that another party placed the bag containing Williams into the bath, and on the balance of probabilities locked the bag. No fingerprints were found around the bath. The coroner was critical of SIS for failing to report Williams missing for seven days, which ... led to the loss of forensic evidence.[2][28][29]
...a senior Yard officer announced that despite a re-examination of all evidence and the investigation of new leads no definitive answers had been obtained as to the cause of Mr Williams's death and the "most probable scenario" was that he had died alone in his flat in Pimlico, central London, as the result of accidentally locking himself inside the bag.[32]
All quotes from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Gareth_Williams (my emphasis).
--------------
British intelligence is perfectly capable of offing their own, or, at a minimum, looking the other way while someone else does their dirty work for them. In the case of the murder of David Kelly (top British WMD expert, offed after he whistleblew to the BBC about Iraq, circa May 2003), British intelligence deliberately withdrew protection from Kelly after outing him to the media, and, also, SEEMINGLY withdrew his "watchers" which is simply not believable. Ergo, his "watchers" watched him being murdered and did nothing.
In addition to hundreds of serious anomalies in that so-called 'investigation' (the "Hutton Report" --which ALSO included ignoring experienced coroners (as well as first-hand witnesses)--the lack of information about Kelly's "watchers" (for surely they were watching him) struck me from the beginning as the biggest "black hole" in that farce. And if he committed suicide, as they allege--also, not believable--the question remains: What were his "watchers" doing while he slowly bled to death from minor wrist wounds, all night, outdoors, near his home?
Jeez.
This coverup looks similar. A British agent rotting away in locked sports bag, in a British intelligence SAFE HOUSE, for seven days, while evidence is disappeared, withheld and lied about, and disinformation (about "cross dressing" and sex games) is promulgated?
Besides all the obvious questions, I think we need to ask about U.S. involvement, since there was clearly U.S. interference in the investigation. (There likely was U.S. involvement in Kelly's murder as well, which has a very close time-line paralleling the Plame/Brewster-Jennings outings.) U.S. and U.K. police-state agencies are intertwined like Siamese twins. And both are so extremely compromised by the use of private contractors that, who knows, these days, who is doing what or for whom?
I think we need to step back, at times, and resist the temptation to consign our democracies to "chaos"--that is, to yield to the notion that our governments--or, rather, our "military-industrial complexes"--are so out-of-control that there is no getting them back into control ("of, by and for the people" . We need to have faith that the truth will prevail and that democracy will reassert itself.
To that end, I would recommend James Douglass' "JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters." Douglass not only convincingly nails the CIA for JFK's murder (disentangles and solves all the mysteries of that coverup), he addresses the spiritual rot within our country's "military-industrial" establishment and its secret agencies that led to that horror.
It is still with us.
We need to start there, I think, as to understanding who and what is in charge now. And we also need to start--as to immediate political action--with the 'TRADE SECRET' voting machines that were spread like a plague throughout our land during the 2002 to 2004 period, now almost all controlled by one, private, far rightwing-connected corporation (ES&S, which bought out Diebold). We CAN'T HAVE a Congress with a 9% approval rating. That is NOT democracy. That is RIGGED elections!
Incidents like Gareth Williams' murder, and David Kelly's murder, and all the rest--and I'm sure most good and honest people have their own lists of anomalous outrages that ravage their spirits and can lead to despair--must not lead us to despair. My own list is getting very long, just for the last decade. It includes names some may not even recognize (for instance, John Wheeler, an acknowledged murder, of a top cyber-security consultant and the force behind the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, still unsolved--and, believe me, covered up; has to do with drones, I think--he was working at the corp that created their software and the systems that control NORAD and almost all military and civilian airports in the world.)
Knowing things, or having good reason to suspect many things about our government, must not lead us to despair. The history of democracy that they don't teach us in school is full of moments of potential despair, to which our forebears did not yield. Study the history of civil rights, labor rights, women's rights, the anti-slavery movement, the environmental movement, the "New Deal," the anti-corporate and "slow food" movements today, and back further than all these, the history of democracy itself, in all its fits and starts. We have notions of democracy and human rights and scientific and social progress today because of all those people before us who DIDN'T DESPAIR, no matter how difficult or hopeless things looked at the time.
Peace
Nihil
(13,508 posts)Thank you for your informative post.
I hope it wakes some people up.
chervilant
(8,267 posts)We humans--with our massive, bicameral brains--seem bent on assigning meaning and order to every teeny tiny experience, and to our very existence. So, we 'discover' the concept of entropy, then eschew it at every turn. Is randomness and disorder so very threatening?!?
Change IS inevitable! We might have learned by now that our economic behaviors are self-destructive, that our over-population is threatening our planet's current ecosystem, and that our extinction event is well underway. Instead, "Kim Kardashian!" "Lady Gaga!!" "Thanksgiving!" "Black Friday!!!" "CHRISTMAS!!!!!!!!"
For those to whom it's not apparent that our species has likely proven itself not viable for the long term, I STILL assert: "DO NOT DESPAIR!" For, what does this stultifying response gain us? Nada, nothing, the big goose egg.
BTW, I have relocated to a very rural area. I have started an organic (French intensive) garden, I am gathering heirloom seeds, and I live VERY near a large creek. I expect to see the next ginormous economic crash, the likes of which we have not yet experienced. I think that the potential reduction in our world population could insure that a small number of us survive. I hope that, if that happens, our survivors learn from our myriad mistakes.
DeSwiss
(27,137 posts)- Upon which no fingerprints were later found....
arely staircase
(12,482 posts)If I had a dollar for everytime I have locked myself in a gym bag. I haven't died yet but then I am no spy.
Nihil
(13,508 posts)> (Metropolitan Police Deputy Assistant Commissioner) Hewitt said the police
> position is that, on balance, it is a more probable conclusion that there was
> no other person present when Gareth died.
Even putting aside the weasel words ("on balance", "more probable" the key
point in this "statement" is the phrase "when Gareth died".
It completes a nice hand-wave over the minutes immediately before he died
in order to project the impression that the entire thing happened while he
was alone.
The coroner was right. The corrupt copper is involved in yet another cover-up.
penultimate
(1,110 posts)struggle4progress
(118,032 posts)Paul Cheston
Published: 25 April 2012
... In a statement read to the court, Mrs Elliot said she had been in bed with her husband Brian at 1.30am when they were woken by Mr Williams shouting for help.
We got up, got the spare keys to the annexe, let ourselves in and asked Gareth if he was alright, she said.
He replied can you help me? He was lying on his back with both arms and hands tied with material, attached to each end of the headboard.
We were in shock. He was wearing boxer shorts and had bedclothes over his legs. He was embarrassed and panicky and apologised and said I wanted to see if I could get myself free ...
http://www.standard.co.uk/news/crime/mi6-spyinbag-gareth-williams-tied-to-bed-in-sex-game-7678657.html
struggle4progress
(118,032 posts)Pathologists said he would have suffocated within three minutes if he had been alive when he got inside it. None of his DNA was found on the lock attached to the bag and his palm prints were not found on the rim of the bath ... DAC Hewitt also said .... ".. there exist evidential contradictions and gaps in our understanding"
MI6 spy Gareth Williams death 'probably an accident', police say
13 November 2013
Last updated at 12:13 ET
struggle4progress
(118,032 posts)... The remains of the maths prodigy were found curled up inside a zipped and padlocked red hold-all at the London flat an intelligence service safe house close to MI6s headquarters ... Detectives found ... make-up, a long-haired wig and unworn womens clothes and shoes worth around £20,000 ... They also found images of transvestites, a picture of Williams wearing only boots, and evidence of visits to sexual bondage websites on his computer ...
What did happen to British spy Gareth Williams who was found dead in a padlocked bag?
13/11 15:53 CET
Benton D Struckcheon
(2,347 posts)struggle4progress
(118,032 posts)local authorities initially ruling the death a suicide. Exhumed, 1962, for new autopsy, and ruled not a suicide. Apparently connected to investigation into frauds committed by Billy Sol Estes
Benton D Struckcheon
(2,347 posts)RebelOne
(30,947 posts)found dead in a rolled up gym mat. The medical examiner ruled it an accident.
http://www.wsbtv.com/ap/ap/crime/prosecutor-reviewing-facts-in-ga-gym-mat-death/nbdXC/
Also this incident that happened not far from my house. I am convinced it was not a suicide. That morning, I heard a horn tooting off and on for about 10 minutes in that area like the horn blower was signaling to someone. I told the detectives this who were questioning everyone in the area and they just blew it off.
http://www.11alive.com/news/article/310620/40/Mans-burned-body-found-in-Woodstock