Whoops. Well, I'm sure it was an honest mistake. After all, a man locking himself inside a bag, in an apartment with the heating turned well up, during a hot summer, sounds like a perfectly normal death and no cause for concern whatsoever, especially when he then fails to turn up to work for a week. Due to, you know, being dead and all.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/9175780/MI6-spy-Gareth-Williams-death-agent-could-not-have-locked-himself-in-bag.html
QuoteThe naked and decomposing body of the 31-year-old GCHQ codebreaker was found in a bag in the bath of his Pimlico flat on August 23, 2010.
Nearly 18 months on, police have been unable to establish what led to his death despite toxicology tests and an exhaustive investigation into his background that has been hampered by errors.
On Friday, at a pre-inquest review, Westminster Coroner's Court was told that his family believe Mr Williams was murdered by a member of "some agency specialising in the dark arts of the secret services".
Concerns were also raised about how Mr Williams' MI6 employers failed to raise the alarm when he failed to arrive for work.
The court heard the delays in finding his body resulted in the post mortem being "ineffective".
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/9179432/Spy-in-holdall-death-believed-he-was-being-followed.html
QuoteOne source told a Sunday newspaper: "Ms Guthrie said Gareth told her he was being followed in the days before his death.
"She didn't know who it was, only that she and Gareth were so concerned that they sometimes varied the route they took home."
Ms Guthrie also told friends after Mr Williams's body was found that he was planning to leave his job so that he could set up his own business with her and another MI6 officer.
"She was very vague about what this would be, only that it would be with another MI6 officer," said the source.
Police have revealed that Mr Williams had been visiting bondage websites and drag clubs and had a £15,000 collection of women's designer clothing and wigs.
Officers do not believe he could have locked himself in the bag but believe his death was probably a sex game that went wrong.
A man and a woman of "Mediterranean appearance" who had visited the flat in the weeks before the death, have since been identified and ruled out.
However, Anthony O'Toole, representing the Williams family, said it was possible the unknown third party who locked him in "was a member of some agency specialising in the dark arts of the secret services, and perhaps evidence was removed from the scene post mortem by an expert in those dark arts."
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ukpress/article/ALeqM5jk-ONfiqY8RpStzpsmeZib1TyENQ?docId=N0020931333109928707A
QuoteForensic scientists apologised to the family of holdall spy Gareth Williams after it emerged that a DNA error had dashed a "key" line of inquiry into his death.
LGC said one of its staff members made a "typographical error" while inputting code, leading Scotland Yard to spend more than a year trying to trace a non-existent suspect.
It was confirmed last month, when LGC carried out a review, that the partial DNA profile belonged to a scientist involved in the case.
"Having made further checks, LGC identified the partial profile as matching that of a Metropolitan Police scientist who was involved in the original investigation of Mr Williams' home," a LGC spokeswoman said.
Jesus. What a circus.
Are you guys hiring from the CIA or something?
It's just a sex-game that went wrong. By killing a man. Who was a spy. Among enough suspicious circumstances to make John le Carre and the corpse of Robert Ludlum to express disbelief. Hardly worth investigating, really.
Quote from: Cain on April 02, 2012, 06:14:57 PM
It's just a sex-game that went wrong. By killing a man. Who was a spy. Among enough suspicious circumstances to make John le Carre and the corpse of Robert Ludlum to express disbelief. Hardly worth investigating, really.
But at least your forensics geeks are top notch, and don't take samples of themselves by accident.
I love this shit.
Who could have forseen that privatised forensic labs would go horribly wrong?
"LGC said one of its staff members made a "typographical error" while inputting code, leading Scotland Yard to spend more than a year trying to trace a non-existent suspect."
I would pay good money for a transcript of the meeting where that came to light.
"Any luck finding that Tim XXX yet?"
"You mean Jim XXX?"
"No, Tim XXX"
"Never heard of him"
Don't blame privatised services. It's cost effective.
Nothing suspicious there at all. I mean, what would Bond do?
Bond's able to spot a man in drag. This sounds more like the work of that bastard 006.
Turns out the apartment - an SIS safe-house - was owned by a front company named "New Rodina". Oh, very amusing, intelligence services.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/may/02/gareth-williams-death-mi6
QuoteThe cause of death of Williams, 31, who was found padlocked in a holdall in the bath at his flat in Pimlico, central London, was "unnatural and likely to have been criminally mediated", said Dr Fiona Wilcox.
Passing a narrative verdict, she said she was satisfied that "a third party placed the bag in the bath and on the balance of probabilities locked the bag".
Some discrepancies have been noted between the inquest and initial reports. According to initial reports and police statements, William's hands were tied behind his back, to such a degree that a police officer initially thought his limbs had been cut off. Yet at the inquest he was said to have had his arms resting on his chest.
We also discovered that William's phone had been wiped. Lets face it, if you're engaged in sex games, you usually don't wipe your phone as a precaution beforehand. So a wiped phone, a man locked in a hold-all, an apartment free of fingerprints and the heating turned up high, in the middle of August. If this was a sex game gone wrong, then the other party managed to clean the scene of incriminating evidence like a pro.
The actions of the intelligence agencies are still hard to explain. Not only was he absent from work for a week, an officer was only dispatched when the HR employee at GCHQ who initially attempted to contact him heard that he was still missing. His locker at Vauxhall House was not secured when the police asked MI6 to, and at least two other people shared the same locker space with him and could have accessed it in the interval.
There is a rumour, that I have not been able to verify thus far, that Williams had been accessing files before his death that had little to do with his current assignment, whatever that may have been, since MI6 have been remarkably cagey about revealing anything to do with that. What is known is that MI6 had approved him for operation deployment - field work - and that his previous assignments had involved attending conferences where criminal hackers were believed to be present. No doubt this played to William's strengths as a mathematician and code-breaker.
The main thing to take away from this is that someone just essentially killed a spy and retreated into the shadows, and either that killer is being protected, or British intelligence are even more incompetent than I originally thought.
Can't speak for British "Intelligence" but isn't this a Met investigation? The Met? Y'know, barely sentient knuckle dragging retards who'd be hard pressed to find their own arse if you handed them a map?
Yup. They also had a meeting with MI6 right at the start of the investigation where MI6 clearly drew the parameters of the investigation up. For instance, there is a heavy suspicion that Williams was going to go undercover, but Six wont allow that to be discussed.
The inquest also said that Six couldn't be ruled out as suspects in the unlawful death. Can you think of any other investigations where a suspect gets to set the parameters of legitimate investigation? Other than NotW hacking, of course?
I was watching a news report of it yesterday with photos of the crime scene. All I could think of was the suicide explanation at the start of Long Dark Teatime of the Soul. :lulz:
Also, you know all those rumours about being a transvestite?
The clothes in his flat were not out of their packaging. And were not in his size. They were however in his sister's size, and he was very close to her.
The rumours about him being into bondage - he was once, 10 years ago, found tied to the bed by his landlady, who helped him get loose. This was shortly after he had been accepted to work for MI6, and could have plausibly been training for attempting to escape being bound.
All those porn sites he supposedly visited? They made up a very small percentage of his online time, and he visited them very infrequently.
All the sex speculation is based on "gays lol" and incomplete or misrepresented information, and came out so quickly I can only conclude it was an intelligence services smear job to try and cover up both Williams' unusual death and his activities shortly preceding it.
Concur! It's a tried and tested formula. Public always laps it up.
Quote from: Cain on May 03, 2012, 12:35:30 PM
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/may/02/gareth-williams-death-mi6
The main thing to take away from this is that someone just essentially killed a spy and retreated into the shadows, and either that killer is being protected, and British intelligence are even more incompetent than I originally thought.
Cain, I think I fixed that for you.
This entire thing has stank for a while. Anyone else see the clips and interviews with the two escape artists who tried to mimic how the body was found? I that's not part of the "look at the strange thing! Don't ask awkward questions" act, I don't know what is.
If they did kill him, they got away with it and so by definition are not incompetent. Even if they did have to wave "national security" in everyone's faces for months on end, in answer to every question.
And while the escape artists was a bit of theatre, it was probably good, because those guys are escape experts and they struggled with the simulation, over hundreds of attempts. If nothing else, that fact will stick in the mind of the public, that someone seriously wrong occured here.
Quote from: Cain on May 04, 2012, 08:07:17 AM
If they did kill him, they got away with it and so by definition are not incompetent.
Does it still count if every man woman and child in the country knows they did it?
I don't see anyone being arrested for this, do you?
And that's all that actually matters.
Point. Still strikes me as cheating, tho. More Ronnie Biggs than Jack the Ripper.
Wild, crazy speculation time.
Say a third party is able to identify one of your spies, compromise him to the point where you can kill them and shove the body in a bag, then pretty much get away clean.
Wouldn't that person be worth hiring?
I've been going over this, and it makes little sense for a government to kill it's own spies. It makes lots of sense to hire spies of other countries.
What I'm getting at is that if who-ever is responsible for this didn't work for MI6 before, they probably could do now. It would explain a lot about why it's being pushed away and hushed up.
/end crazy speculation
Something doesnt feel right about that. I dunno. I imagine that its either they offed their own guy for some reason or that theyre trying to downplay that one of their agents let himself get killed somehow.
And by that i mean he let his guard down and was taken out by a better spy from elsewhere perhaps.
I don't understand the bag business at all.
Why put someone in a bag once you've killed them? I can think of three possible reasons:
1) to minimize the smell
2) in order to transport them elsewhere to dispose of them
3) to send a message
All are possible. A killer that was intending to do b) might have been interrupted, and so unable to complete the disposal of the body. a) prevents discovery for long enough that the method of killing is hard to distinguish (especially if injections are used) and c)...well, then we'd have to know the motive for killing him, which could be almost anything.
Given that the rest of the place was professionally "cleaned" 2 doesn't sit right. You're able to kill, clear up pretty much all evidence, shove a body in a bag and you can't remove it? Just sounds wrong to me, I doubt people who are capable of the above shit themselves when someone knocks on the door.
That really only leaves smell minimization to be the logical choice. Messages tend to be a bit more public and nasty (Litvinenko anyone?)
In other news, a film version of Spy Vs Spy has been announced. I can only hope they take a reference or two from things like this.
I iamgine with the heat turned up that the bag was both to reduce smell and aid decomposition. But does that mean they were going to come back for the bag after the body rotted enough? Why leave it there?
Quote from: P3nT4gR4m on May 03, 2012, 04:38:13 PM
I was watching a news report of it yesterday with photos of the crime scene. All I could think of was the suicide explanation at the start of Long Dark Teatime of the Soul. :lulz:
:lulz: :lulz:
Ah, Dirk Gently. Been a while since I read those.
Quote from: Bruce Twillis on May 04, 2012, 03:06:46 PM
I iamgine with the heat turned up that the bag was both to reduce smell and aid decomposition. But does that mean they were going to come back for the bag after the body rotted enough? Why leave it there?
implant/swallowed key?
Lower profile than using modern imaging, maybe.
Quote from: Cain on April 02, 2012, 06:20:01 PM
"Who could have forseen that privatised _____ would go horribly wrong?"
NEXT GREAT MEME.
Chances of this being an official cover-up on the Met side of things just dropped considerably
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-17993222
QuoteMI6 staff may have samples of their DNA checked following the death of MI6 officer Gareth Williams, the head of the Metropolitan Police has confirmed.
Bernard Hogan-Howe also demanded that MI6 give "unrestricted access" to detectives for the first time, as Scotland Yard reinvestigate the case.
The naked body of Mr Williams, 31, from Anglesey, was found locked in a bag in a bath in his London flat in 2010.
A coroner has concluded that he was probably unlawfully killed.
She also said she doubted whether Mr Williams' death would ever be explained, saying that "fundamental questions" remained unanswered.
Mr Hogan-Howe said any screening of staff at MI6 would be voluntary and could involve a few MI6 officers, or many.
A number of DNA samples were taken during the previous investigation.
Mr Hogan-Howe said: "Of course it may well be that Gareth Williams' death has nothing to do with employment. All we need to do is to make sure that all areas of his life were fully explored."
When asked if MI6 had agreed to grant new levels of access, Mr Hogan-Howe said they didn't have to: "It's called the law."
He criticised an "unacceptable" breakdown in communication over potential evidence, which emerged during the inquest.
I love that line, "it's called the law".
Quote from: Cain on May 08, 2012, 09:41:25 PM
Chances of this being an official cover-up on the Met side of things just dropped considerably
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-17993222
QuoteMI6 staff may have samples of their DNA checked following the death of MI6 officer Gareth Williams, the head of the Metropolitan Police has confirmed.
Bernard Hogan-Howe also demanded that MI6 give "unrestricted access" to detectives for the first time, as Scotland Yard reinvestigate the case.
The naked body of Mr Williams, 31, from Anglesey, was found locked in a bag in a bath in his London flat in 2010.
A coroner has concluded that he was probably unlawfully killed.
She also said she doubted whether Mr Williams' death would ever be explained, saying that "fundamental questions" remained unanswered.
Mr Hogan-Howe said any screening of staff at MI6 would be voluntary and could involve a few MI6 officers, or many.
A number of DNA samples were taken during the previous investigation.
Mr Hogan-Howe said: "Of course it may well be that Gareth Williams' death has nothing to do with employment. All we need to do is to make sure that all areas of his life were fully explored."
When asked if MI6 had agreed to grant new levels of access, Mr Hogan-Howe said they didn't have to: "It's called the law."
He criticised an "unacceptable" breakdown in communication over potential evidence, which emerged during the inquest.
I love that line, "it's called the law".
Intelligence agencies being held accountable for their actions? What strange world is this?
Not yet. We still haven't had a proper look at torture, after all. And the DNA tests are only voluntary.
But it's a start.