Metro : MI6 and police ‘held on to evidence after spy Gareth Williams’ death’

MI6 and police ‘held on to evidence after spy Gareth Williams’ death’

By Joel Taylor | May 1, 2012

MI6 and a senior Scotland Yard detective have been criticised for failing to disclose evidence in the death of spy Gareth Williams.

The secret service and Det Supt Michael Broster did not reveal the existence of nine memory sticks and a North Face bag, similar to the one Mr Williams’s body was found in, at his office, an inquest heard.

Coroner Fiona Wilcox told the counter-terror officer, who was unable to rule out secret service involvement in the death, that he had offered ‘total non-sequitur’ reasons for failing to pass on evidence.

‘I suggest that this means you have not been completely impartial in this case,’ she added.

His assistant, Det Con Colin Hall, said ‘there was stuff of a sensitive nature’ in the bag but, when asked what, he told Westminster coroner’s court he could not remember.

Det Con Hall’s search of the 31-year-old’s workplace in Vauxhall, central London, was called off shortly after the spy was found dead in his Pimlico flat in August 2010.

On the last day of evidence in the inquest, the Williams family barrister Anthony O’Toole accused the officer of being as ‘helpful as a London pea souper’.

Det Ch Insp Jackie Sebire, the senior officer investigating the death, said she was not told about the missing evidence until Monday. ‘What I knew was that Gareth’s email accounts had been checked but I did not know that other media had been checked,’ she added.

Poisoning and asphyxiation were the ‘foremost contenders’ for the cause of his death, pathologists have said.