October 2008 Archives

The 2007 World Cup was supposed to be a relaxed affair as the West Indies played host to a carnival of cricket.
But the peace and quiet of this most tranquil of international sporting occasions was ripped apart when the Pakistan coach Bob Woolmer was found dead in his luxurious hotel room.
As if the death of one of the most gifted tacticians the game had ever known was not shocking enough, the Jamaican Police promptly announced that they were launching a murder investigation following a post mortem examination of his body.
Cricket went into meltdown, with accusations that match fixers, enraged fans and even angry players could have played a part in the 58 year-old coach's demise.
What began as a tragedy turned into a global media circus.
Lurid allegations about the Pakistan team, a cabal of murderous sub-continental bookmakers, and even Woolmer's personal life emerged as a chaotic murder investigation lurched from one implausible scenario to the next.
After an interminable delay of more than three months, and with the Met Police called over from London to assist in the investigation, further forensic tests suggested Woolmer had died accidentally and the Jamaican authorities announced that he had succumbed to death by "natural causes".
In November 2007 an official inquest recorded an open verdict, leaving conspiracy theorists to speculate about this bizarre mystery.
So how did Bob Woolmer meet his untimely end, and why does the world still not know what really happened inside that hotel room?

When the BBC and the government clashed over the "45 minute" dossier that took Britain to war in Iraq there was always going to be trouble.
But no-one could have imagined that the heated battle over whether Saddam could launch biological weapons at Britain in less than an hour would lead to the tragic death of Dr David Kelly.
A highly-respected weapons expert and UN inspector, Kelly tipped-off BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan that No. 10's dossier over the capacity of the Iraqi military to attack Britain in 45 minutes had been "sexed-up".
After vehement denials by Tony Blair and his spin-doctor-in-chief Alastair Campbell, Kelly, who had remained anonymous thanks to Gilligan's refusal to name his source, was clumsily unveiled as the whistle blower by Whitehall.
He was pitched into a political maelstrom, which saw him torn apart by senior officials, scrutinised by the press and forced to appear before a parliamentary hearing on the sexed-up dossier.
Within days of giving evidence to the investigation into the scandal, Dr Kelly's body was found on 18 July 2003 in woodland near his home in
Oxfordshire.
He had failed to return from his regular afternoon walk the previous day, and was discovered on Harrowdown Hill, less than a mile from his house.
The immediate story was that Kelly had taken an overdose of co-proxamol painkillers and slit his left wrist. The government's Hutton Inquiry backed this version of events, but many in the conspiracy community are not so sure.
Of all the cases we have looked at in this series of blogs the circumstances of Dr Kelly's death seem the most sinister, the most dark and underhand. Here was a man used to dealing with the press. He was happy, well-adjusted and comfortable in his own skin.
The suggestion that a man like this would kill himself over the furore that erupted following the BBC's report is baffling.
But surely there must be evidence to back the officially-sanctioned suicide theory?
Not according to the expert toxicologists who have come forward to argue that he did not have a fatal amount of co-proxamol in his system.
And not according to the paramedics on the scene, who claim the amount of blood found on his body was not consistent with the quantity normally found on a man who had slit his wrists.
This appears to be a very disturbing case indeed, and has left conspiracy theorists convinced that Kelly was murdered by the secret services to put an end to the damaging Iraq dossier affair.

Less than 90 miles from the bright lights of Las Vegas lies a military facility so secretive that the US government spent decades denying its existence.
On the edge of Groom Lake, deep in the Nevada desert, the entrance to Area 51 is decked out with "no trespass" signs and warnings to intruders that deadly force may be used on those who venture into the base.
The fact that the military are hiding something inside is beyond doubt, but what exactly is lurking behind the ultra-tight security is the subject of intense speculation in the conspiracy community.
In the dry bed of Papoose Lake, just south of the main base, the government is said to be testing top secret aircraft, described by those who have come forward to lift the lid on Area 51 as "flying discs".
UFO watchers believe these crafts are reverse engineered from crashed alien spaceships which have been recovered and analysed at Area 51 for half a century.
Over the past decade the US government has grudgingly admitted that it does have a top secret base at Groom Lake, but the authorities remain tight-lipped about the nature of the classified operations at the site.
So the question facing conspiracy theorists is simple. Are we speculating wildly about highly-developed human technology being tested by the air force?
Or has the US military stored, reverse engineered and perfected the techniques used to produce alien aircraft?