Guardian : MI6 officer's body was found locked in sports holdall, says coroner

MI6 officer's body was found locked in sports holdall, says coroner

Inquest into Gareth Williams's death hears his remains were in advanced state of decay when discovered at a safehouse

by James Meikle | September 1, 2010

The body of an MI6 officer found in a London flat had been padlocked into a sports holdall and was in "an advanced state of decay", an inquest heard today.

Gareth Williams, 30, a codebreaker on secondment from GCHQ Cheltenham, was discovered in an MI6 safehouse last month, eight days after he had last been seen.

A postmortem examination failed to establish a cause of death, but toxicological tests are being carried out to establish whether drink, drugs or poisoning were a factor. A pathologist has found that Williams was not stabbed or shot and there were no obvious signs of strangulation.

At the opening of the inquest into his death, the Westminster coroner, Paul Knapman, revealed that the body was locked inside a sports holdall, according to a coroner's court spokeswoman.

Knapman told the hearing the information he had received from police was that Williams's body was in a large holdall in the bath of an en-suite bathroom of the main bedroom. The inquest was then adjourned until next Wednesday.

Knapman would be kept informed of how the investigation is progressing and will consider when to release the body so a funeral can take place, the spokeswoman added.

There have been conflicting reports over what led to Williams's death, but his family have complained about the "horrible and completely fictitious accounts of his death" in the media.