SF Chronicle : U.K. Spy Found Zipped in Locked Bag Died by Accident, Police Say

U.K. Spy Found Zipped in Locked Bag Died by Accident, Police Say

Jeremy Hodges, ©2013 Bloomberg News | November 13, 2013

Nov. 13 (Bloomberg) -- U.K. police investigating the death of a U.K. intelligence-agency worker who was found naked and padlocked inside a duffel bag in his apartment, said he wasn’t murdered.

Gareth Williams, 31, was found in August 2010 in his apartment in the Pimlico neighborhood of London. He had been working for MI6, the British overseas intelligence agency, as a code-breaker at the time of his death.

“It is now proven that it is theoretically possible for a person to lock themselves in that exact holdall, with the same type of lock,” Martin Hewitt, Detective Assistant Commissioner of London’s Metropolitan Police, said in a press briefing today.

The force interviewed 27 people from MI6 and Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters, known as GCHQ, and concluded that Williams’s death wasn’t connected to his work, Hewitt said.

A London coroner ruled in May 2012 that Williams’s death was “criminally mediated,” stopping short of calling his death an unlawful killing on the grounds that there wasn’t enough evidence.

--Editors: Lindsay Fortado, Anthony Aarons

To contact the reporter on this story: Jeremy Hodges in London at jhodges17@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Anthony Aarons at aaarons@bloomberg.net