Guardian : Who was Gareth Williams?

Who was Gareth Williams?

When the bagged body of an MI6 agent was found in a bathtub, speculation went into overdrive. Was it suicide? Murder? A professional hit, or a sexual game gone wrong?

Cathy Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy | November 20, 2010

Three months after his body was found in a holdall in the bath of his Pimlico flat, police still seem no closer to finding out what happened to Gareth Williams.

On Tuesday 24 August, a storm was brewing off the North Wales coast. As gusts reached 50mph in the village of Valley, on Anglesey, two sodden police officers stood at a front door on a close of modern bungalows above the beach. They knocked and knocked. Eventually someone ran out into the rain to tell them that Ellen and Ian Williams were away on holiday in the US. While detectives tried to locate the Williams abroad, someone found Ellen's father, John Hughes, who lived around the corner and broke the news: his 31-year-old grandson Gareth, a boy who had always been fit and healthy, was dead. Grandpa John was so distraught that he tripped, cut his head and had to be taken to hospital.

Then Gareth's uncle, William Hughes, who lived on a farm in nearby Trefor village, got the call. "Gareth couldn't be dead? Surely not?" Uncle William sat numbly with Gareth's 86-year-old great aunt before their open fire, staring at the porcelain figures on the mantelpiece. Gareth had been an exceptional boy, selected to work as some kind of analyst for GCHQ, the government's secret listening station in Cheltenham, but the family never talked about it. And neither did Gareth. He'd been home just three weeks earlier, recalled Hughes, cycling the lanes on his race bike before the whole family had got together. But his life was "now being lived a long way from the family in Anglesey," Hughes said, "so some things we couldn't know."

On 25 August, Ian and Ellen Williams touched down at Manchester airport and were met by police, who officially broke the news that two days earlier in London, a man believed to be their son had been found dead. The body had been found padlocked inside a sports bag in the flat where Gareth was staying. It could have been there for up to a fortnight. As they were escorted to the capital, to join their daughter Ceri, there were news reports everywhere: "British spy murdered." Apparently he had been "stabbed to death". According to stories, Gareth was a brain-box, a techie who "worked with codes", as far as they knew. Was he also a spy, they wondered?

For Ellen and Ian, Gareth's death was a horror story that "destroyed" them. For the rest of the world, it was a rare glimpse into the clandestine world of espionage. His death was compared to that of Georgi Markov, the Bulgarian dissident killed by a poison-tipped umbrella in London 32 years before, and the 2006 murder of Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko. Cold war details increased public fervour. The building in which the body was found was owned by a private company, registered offshore, called New Rodina. Rodina was Russian for "motherland". Did real spies read John Le Carré too?

In the midst of lurid speculation, Ian and Ellen Williams reached London. In normal circumstances, they would be required to make a physical identification. However, given the degree of decomposition, police would rely on family photos. Was Gareth murdered, his distraught family asked. Despite launching a major investigation – Operation Finlayson – Scotland Yard were finding it a hard question to answer. One major problem facing investigators was the length of time that the body had lain undiscovered. Another was that they were being blocked by the security services from probing too deeply into Williams's life. Detectives had no idea what Gareth Williams really did or who he was, and had been unable as yet to find anyone close to him. They needed the family's help.

Gareth's sister Ceri, a physiotherapist, and her husband Dr Chris Subbe, a senior registrar at Wrexham Maelor Hospital, told police they had seen Gareth in June, when he had taken them for tea at the Ritz in London to celebrate their second wedding anniversary. He'd been in the capital for more than six months, but couldn't say what he was doing.

The three spent that afternoon "laughing and joking", and afterwards continued to talk frequently by phone. Ceri last spoke to her brother on 11 August, after he returned from a short trip to the US. He now intended to "tidy things up", before returning to GCHQ in Cheltenham on 3 September.

Ceri's dates matched what police learned from Gareth's former landlady, Jenny Elliot, who had rented him a room in her house near Cheltenham for the 10 years he had worked for GCHQ, before transferring to London last year. Gareth had called her in August, asking if he could return. "Like we were going to say no," Elliot says. "He was about the best lodger you could ever have. I mean, you never heard a word from him. He had no TV, record player, or anything."

Ceri had called her brother again about a week later. No answer. She tried repeatedly, becoming worried. Gareth was like a Swiss watch. Now she contacted the police; the security services were already concerned, as Gareth had failed to show for work. On 23 August, at 6.30pm, a uniformed officer was sent to Williams's top-floor flat in a Georgian townhouse in Alderney Street, Pimlico. It was only a few hundred yards from the MI6 headquarters at Vauxhall, and was used by the Secret Intelligence Service as a safe house. A lettings agent who held a spare key showed the policeman in. He was asked to wait downstairs as the officer went up and entered the curtained rooms. The place was "spotless": two iPhones, some sim cards and an Apple notebook sat on a table. Then he entered the bathroom, and found a holdall in the bathtub. Red liquid seeped from it. Inside was a body, in such a contorted position that he thought its "legs and arms had been cut off". Radioing for assistance, the policeman noted that there were no signs a struggle. This was not a robbery or home invasion. It was a "neat job", a euphemism for a professional kill.

Given his clearances and access to classified material, Williams's death triggered alarm across Whitehall. MI5 agents swept through the Alderney Street flat, followed by detectives from the Homicide and Serious Crime Command, assisted by SO15, Scotland Yard's Counter Terrorism Command. Alderney Street was cordoned off as Home Office scientists began processing the scene. Once the spooks had departed, it was down to the murder squad to study the evidence. So far, they had a body in an "advanced state of decay". There was no weapon and no sign of forced entry or a struggle.

Concentrating on the holdall and its contents, detectives established that Williams had not been stabbed, shot or hacked to pieces. On August 25, Home Office pathologist Dr Ben Swift carried out a post-mortem that, together with the first batch of toxicological tests, came back "inconclusive". "If we don't know what to look for, and are not guided by what we see or smell on the body, we cannot find it," says a forensic scientist who worked on the Litvinenko case. "We do 50 obvious poisons. Fifty rare. We can do the isotopes. Litvinenko alerted us to that. But in the absence of a specific direction, the possibilities are as limitless as a killer's imagination… and we cannot test for that."

Detectives set out their theories. One reading of the crime scene pointed to a forensically aware hit man. Slender 5ft 7in Gareth had been stuffed inside the near-airtight red North Face sports bag and placed in the bath, containing any spillage and minimising odours, too. The heating was on, increasing the rate of decomposition, which significantly lessened the chances of retrieving evidence from the corpse.

Or perhaps the body in the bag was evidence of a stage-managed "personal event", masterminded by a controlling individual. Was this a suicide (with Williams acting on his own)? Or a sadistic or masochistic sexual act gone wrong (with Williams engaging in some kind of auto-erotic asphyxiation?). "If you can imagine it, then we are investigating it," a detective said in late August. But what would shape police inquiries was the dawning realisation that Gareth Williams had not been alone.

Returning to the holdall, studying the zips and lock, police became certain that he could not have locked himself inside. And there was further proof that someone else must have been in the flat with him: his front door had been locked from the outside.

Criminal psychologists studied the case. One, who spoke anonymously, thought his death might have been a masochistic ritual that had gone wrong: "For a retentive individual with an ever-green mind like Gareth Williams, always on duty and in control, the bag could have been a furtive release."

The Williams family was adamant that the Gareth they knew would not have behaved this way. And, for now, the family was all the police had, since they had found no close friends or lovers. Another pressing problem with their theories was that detectives had failed to turn up any other suspects or accomplices.

Police, pathologists and forensic investigators agreed on one thing only. They would have to focus on the 12 days between the last call Gareth made to Ceri and the discovery of his body on 23 August. Pulling mobile phone records and credit card transactions, scouring hours of CCTV footage, the Operation Finlayson team dug deep, as ever more lurid stories circulated.

"Murdered MI6 worker Gareth Williams was a secret transvestite who may have been killed by a gay lover, detectives said yesterday… Cops found women's clothing that would fit him at his Pimlico flat in central London." The Sun ran with this version of events, while other newspapers, quoting similar unnamed sources, reported that cocaine had been found, a cache of gay pornography, a small armoury of S&M paraphernalia. Williams was also said to have frequently paid for male escorts.

Senior detectives angrily rebutted the stories. Uncle William in Anglesey thought they read like a concerted smear, and wondered why anyone would want to destroy Gareth's reputation after he was dead.

Like most well-constructed character assassinations, however, this one was founded on a grain of fact that made it that much harder to quash. Detectives had been quietly investigating whether Gareth Williams was gay. They had canvassed witnesses in the Vauxhall Cross village of gay clubs and bars, a short walk from Alderney Street. They had also studied Williams's computers and reading matter, his journals, magazines and computer cache. Despite outright denials from his family, detectives were privately certain that Gareth was gay, although they had been unable to find trace of any sexual encounters. They had also come to believe that his sexual orientation was not central to the inquiry (although his sexual preferences might be). There was no evidence of Williams paying for escorts, buying S&M equipment, using porn or drugs of any kind. "This man didn't really even drink," one frustrated detective said.

The police felt they were being hurried along by other parties, keen for the scandal to go away. "Someone, somewhere, who has access to case material, is saying, 'He's queer and asked for it', rather than waiting for the outcome of the case," one veteran detective said.

In North Wales, the family lit their fires, closed their curtains and privately pondered if anyone had ever understood the real Gareth.

At Ysgol Gynradd Morswyn, Gareth's primary school, a short hop between Valley and Holyhead, head teacher Islwyn Williams remembers him as an exceptional pupil. At five, Gareth made a beeline for the school computer and never left it. While most of his classmates were still playing with Lego, Gareth had a GCSE in maths. At the age of 10, he went to secondary school, gaining A grades in A-level maths and computer science at 13. The school contacted Bangor University, which accepted him as a part-time student on a maths degree course. "He was the best logician… with the fastest brain I have ever met," said Geraint Williams, his maths teacher.

Fellow pupils remember Gareth as a loner. Dylan Parry, 34, thought him "isolated" by his intellect. His abilities shut him off from everyone else. He was naive. Parry believed someone "could easily take advantage of him". He recalled Gareth travelling by train each week to university, while still living at home with Ian and Ellen. Too clever for school. Too young for university.

The family downplay his isolation. They point to their closeness and his sporting prowess. By the time he was 17, Gareth had followed his father into competitive cycling. Keith Thompson, of Holyhead Cycling Club, with whom Ian and Gareth rode, says: "He was a really lovely young man, but wasn't a great conversationalist. Gareth wasn't the sort to go to the pub after a race."

In 1997, aged 18, Gareth left home to begin a PhD at Manchester University, acquiring an advanced level of learning that sat uneasily with his elementary life skills, although his academic mentor, professor Terry Hewitt, believed he could take it: "He was very private and worked well on his own. He was certainly not a 'geek' even if he was reserved." His dissertation focused on computer games. They had always been a private passion, with him achieving an online reputation as unbeatable. Three years on, aged 21, Gareth was approached by the British security services, who the university believes had spotted his precocious online gaming abilities. Hewitt recalled: "In 2000, Gareth came into my office and said, 'I'm going to GCHQ'. He had to tell me, as I was his referee for his vetting." Gareth left Manchester and Anglesey behind to sign the Official Secrets Act.

Williams began an advanced maths course at St Catharine's College, Cambridge, but withdrew the following year, torn between academia and the demands of his new employer. At GCHQ, he was seen as stable, reliable and potentially brilliant, according to a contractor who worked there at the time. Speaking on condition of anonymity, he recalled that GCHQ was a world in which Gareth fitted, working alone, or in small teams, waist-deep in mathematical problems, challenged by cutting-edge technology and real-time problems. Possibly for the first time, he was part of a community of similarly focused individuals who were taken on for their discretion as well as for their brains, intercepting, monitoring and analysing email and telephone calls from around the world. He did feel the pressure, constantly, according to the contractor, who noted that at GCHQ many technicians were as clever or cleverer than Williams.

Work became his life. There was little time for much outside it, something evidenced by how he chose to live, renting a modest room in the Prestbury area of the town. Inside was a single, child-sized bed, a small chest of drawers, three upright wooden chairs and a gas heater – all furnished by Jenny Elliot. Over the decade he spent there, Williams introduced no luxuries, accumulated no clutter. He brought no one back. He rarely even went out after work, excepting an occasional "drink with colleagues". He worked late into the night and rose early. There was something oppressively austere about him, those colleagues thought, something they used to call his "GDR sensibility". So serious and quiet was he that when he did become animated, he "alarmed people with his unusual laugh".

Due to the nature of his work, it is hard for those who met Gareth to describe what he did, and those who talked to us did so having already left GCHQ. But all agreed that, although very capable, Williams was "a middle-ranking" technician "asserting himself in a number of sensitive areas, any one of which could theoretically have brought him into contact with enemies of our state". While GCHQ gathers intelligence from Europe, Africa and Russia, its partners in the US National Security Agency (NSA) also had access to British and European signals traffic at Menwith Hill, a top-secret RAF base near Harrogate, in Yorkshire.

When Williams arrived at Menwith, shortly after the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, GCHQ and the NSA were increasingly focused on the threat of Islamist violence at home and abroad. "Between the UK and the US, we were deluged by the chatter from radicals here and over the Atlantic as they talked on landlines, satellite or mobile phones – with contacts in hot countries like Pakistan and Afghanistan, as well as with Saudi, and hubs like Dubai," one former GCHQ security consultant said. "A group around Williams worked on software to assemble, search and analyse the data, drawing out patterns and meanings."

Williams's elevation within GCHQ came with the "Liquid Bomb" plot, where a group of British radicals of Asian origin were found to be planning to detonate home-made explosives on board seven flights to major north American cities. Intercepting emails and phone calls between these plotters and their contacts abroad, Williams flew between the UK and the US, working at Fort Meade (the NSA HQ, in Baltimore).

Williams was brought into close proximity to US intelligence, Islamic radicals and Middle Eastern agents. He would rub shoulders with the Russians, too, according to a foreign intelligence analyst based in the UK, who described how technology and software honed by GCHQ was deployed in tracking a Moscow-backed sleeper cell to which Britain had been alerted as early as 2003. The case blew up in June 2010 when 10 people were arrested in the US and accused of being part of an espionage ring. One of them, a glamorous 28-year-old called Anna Chapman, had lived for five years in the UK. According to the former GCHQ contractor, "Williams had been obsessed by the case, its methodology and characters."

He was now on secondment to MI6, with its focus on foreign targets and intelligence-gathering, becoming more of a spy than a desk-bound technician, although Williams would shortly be called back to GCHQ to work on a new and ambitious project.

He had been liaising again with counterparts at the NSA, who were part of an effort to create an American cyber defence policy, to prevent the siphoning off of secret or commercially sensitive data or a military style assault on defence or civil systems. Its importance was alluded to last month in a speech by home secretary Theresa May, in which she identified cyber crime as among the pre-eminent future threats facing the UK. A cyber crimes specialist who knew Williams revealed that at the time of his death he was researching British vulnerability to Russian, Turkish and Chinese gangs: "He was already on top of it."

Rogue individuals and nation states, Islamist terror groups and radical loners, extortionists and organised criminals – these were just some of those Williams had observed, investigated, disrupted and provoked. Any one of them was capable of reciprocating, lethally.

Back at the Yard, Operation Finlayson detectives were looking at a vast range of potential threats, but still had few clues, no accomplices or even a plausible denouement for a man whose personal and professional inclinations were to camouflage everything he did.

By September, an exhaustive trawl had come up with some CCTV footage. In the frames released to the public, Gareth Williams saunters by Holland Park tube station in west London at 3pm on 14 August, three days after he had last spoken to his sister.

Staff at the nearby Valerie's Patisserie said that in the week before, a man fitting Gareth's description had spent several hours in the cafe on consecutive days, sitting at the rear with a laptop, receiving occasional visitors. One security source said that he believed Williams was "working" in west London – monitoring one of the many foreign embassies in the area – just as he had been "working" while on his recent "holiday" to the US.

Police released footage of Williams on 15 August, too. At 2pm, he was filmed at a cash machine, visiting Harrods, walking at 2.30pm via Hans Crescent in Knightsbridge towards Sloane Street. Soon after he vanished.

By the end of September, after a second barrage of toxicology tests proved inconclusive, Gareth Williams's body was released and laid to rest in North Wales. On 26 September, the extended Williams clan gathered outside the Bethel chapel in Holyhead to bid farewell. Given the florid rumours that had circulated around his death, they were surprised by the appearance there of Sir John Sawers, head of MI6. Williams had been with his service for less than a year, yet Sawyers told reporters, "I wanted to be here today as the only public face of the Secret Intelligence Service. My deepest sympathies go to the family. Gareth was a hugely talented person, and he was very modest and generous as well. He did really valuable work with us in the cause of national security."

What a difference 30 days make. After an investigation that had failed to turn up the smallest vice, Williams was no longer lampooned but celebrated as a very British spy: modest, capable and known well by no one.

As they buried Gareth, Dr Chris Subbe, speaking for his wife Ceri and the family, recalled how they had laughed and chatted with him at the Ritz, celebrating their marriage and his brilliant career. "The world was ours for the taking," he said. "Yet here I am three months later to the day, trying to describe your rich life with my poor words."

Independent : The enigma of a code-breaker's death

The enigma of a code-breaker's death

The reputation of a brilliant man who served his country will be for ever tainted by the failure to explain his demise

By David Randall | September 26, 2010

On Friday, in the Bethel Methodist Chapel in Angelsey, the funeral was held of Gareth Williams. In life, he was a mathematician and an encryption specialist so highly regarded that he was seconded from GCHQ in Cheltenham to work at MI6 in London. In death, he is an enigma, an infuriating mystery for most of us, a deeply upsetting puzzle to his parents; for, though his body is now laid to rest, the questions about the bizarre way he met his end show no sign of being buried. Yesterday brought another theory, something this saga has attracted as a September orchard does wasps.

The facts are these. Gareth Williams was 31, studied mathematics at Cambridge, was recruited by the government's listening and monitoring operation in Gloucestershire, and was lent for a year to MI6. He moved to London last September, lived in a five-storey security services safe house at 36 Alderney Street, Pimlico, worked on matters such as computer security involving the City, and led, as far as police can tell, a rather introverted existence – no known partners or lovers, and little socialising. His only enthusiasm beyond his work seems to have been cycling.

Last month, he took a holiday. He went to the United States, returned on 11 August, and was last seen alive on CCTV at Holland Park Tube station on 14 August, and shopping near Harrods the following day. Eight days later, when he failed to appear back at work, colleagues raised the alarm, and officers went to his home. His flat seemed undisturbed and unoccupied, but in the bath they found a red, outsized, zipped and padlocked North Face holdall. Inside were the decaying remains of Mr Williams. His body (he was 5ft 8in tall) was naked, curled up tightly, with his arms and legs contorted behind him. The bag had 140 litres of storage capacity, and was double-stitched. The flat's direct telephone link to MI6 had not been used, and its front door had been locked from the outside.

Subsequent tests have established that Mr Williams had not been drugged by any known substances and had not taken drink, and his body, the apartment and holdall showed no signs of a struggle. There were no scratches or bruises on his body. Initial examinations indicate that he died of suffocation, with dehydration contributing, but confirmation of this will have to wait for the results of two post-mortems, due in a fortnight's time.

As if these facts were not riddle or sensational enough in themselves, the speculation – by "sources" real or imagined, online or off – has added further layers of weirdness. Into the vacuum created by no swift explanation has rushed a large quantity of hot air and now discredited or denied theorising. He was a sado-masochist ("more James Bondage than James Bond", as The West Australian leeringly put it) with a flat full of porn and restraint equipment. Not true, say police. He had 12 gay lovers. Wrong again on several levels, apparently. He was poisoned "by a foreign power" or "terrorist group" (he had worked, briefly, on systems in both Northern Ireland and Afghanistan), possibly by being injected with polonium, the substance that did for Alexander Litvinenko. There is no evidence for this, either.

What has some credibility is the latest idea, floated by yesterday's Daily Mail, that "MI6 spook did not die alone". This was an answer to the stories that Mr Williams died as a result of a hazardous sex game, a form of auto-eroticism that involved him being able to confine himself in the holdall and then somehow close the zip and secure the padlock. A woman police officer had, according to previous reports emanating from the Mail group and others, re-enacted this scenario to a fully padlocked conclusion.

This theory, which left the locking of the front door from the outside somewhat unexplained, was now, however, pooh-poohed, and, according to the Mail, "He was padlocked into the bag by someone else... and was alive when he got into – or was forced into – the bag." Yet the sex game idea was not entirely abandoned, as it was now speculated that he may have been shut in the bag, his assistant (or assistants) locking it before departing the flat; they were due to return to release him but miscalculated and found him dead when they came back.

This line of thought, outré though it sounds, does lead back to the remaining known facts about Mr Williams' life in London. Both of them involve his association with a couple who have yet to be traced. It has been established, for instance, that, twice a week over a period of a few months, Mr Williams had gone to the Patisserie Valerie in Holland Park, ordered an americano and waited. After a while, a couple would appear, order nothing, talk to Mr Wiliams for some minutes and then leave. Then there is a couple, described as "of Mediterranean appearance" (which the couple in the café were not, eye-witnesses say), who had a key, or at least ready access to Mr Williams' MI6 flat. Neighbours say that this pair did not, as far as they casually observed, need to be "buzzed up" to the flat by Mr Williams.

And so the mystery now lies, doomed – unless clarity is achieved soon – to churn for ever in the articles and websites of conspiracy theorists, leaving the name and reputation of a brilliant man in the service of his country tainted by the failure to explain his death adequately.

This Is London : Mystery over couple who visited ‘spy in bag’ case flat

Mystery over couple who visited ‘spy in bag’ case flat

Justin Davenport, Crime Editor | September 13, 2010

A COUPLE appear to have vanished after calling at the flat of MI6 codebreaker Gareth Williams whose body was found locked inside a bag in his bath, police said today.

Detectives say they have failed to trace the “Mediterranean couple” who visited the flat — owned by the intelligence services — in June or July despite appeals for them to come forward.

They believe the couple, in their thirties, were known to Mr Williams as neighbours do not recall buzzing them into the address. Detectives believe they could be significant to the inquiry.

The body of the GCHQ codebreaker and maths genius was found inside a zipped and padlocked North Face hold-all three weeks ago today.

The bag had been placed inside the flat's ensuite bath and may have been there for up to eight days. Police have been baffled by the death because there were no signs of violence, and toxicology tests showed Mr Williams had not taken drugs or alcohol. There were also no signs of a struggle or a forced entry at the flat in Alderney Street and nothing appeared to have been stolen.

Tests are unable to suggest if Mr Williams was dead or alive when he entered the bag. Reports that the 5ft 8in Mr Williams could have closed the padlock around the two zip handles from inside the bag have been played down by detectives, who have been unable to find a method for doing it.

They view it as extremely unlikely that he padlocked the bag himself.

That suggests Mr Williams was either forced into it against his ill, co-operated with a second party in a possible sex game or was already dead when he was placed inside the holdall.

The results of further tests for the possible presence of a rare toxin are being awaited. Police do not believe the mystery couple is the same as one Mr Williams met regularly at Patisserie Valerie in Holland Park, who were not Mediterranean in appearance.

Anyone with information should call 020 8358 0200, or Crimestoppers anonymously on 0800 555 111.

Telegraph : Murdered spy 'could have climbed into sports bag' before death

Murdered spy 'could have climbed into sports bag' before death

The spy whose naked body was found in a sports bag in an empty bath in Pimlico could have been alive when he was put into the bag, police believe.

By Duncan Gardham, Security Correspondent | September 12, 2010

Detectives believe that someone else padlocked Gareth Williams into the red North Face holdall where his body was found on August 23.

They remain open to the possibility that Mr Williams climbed into the bag as part of a sex game and then suffocated. His body was found in the flat eight days after he was last seen alive.

Another option is that he was poisoned before his body was put into the bag. Tests have ruled out alcohol or recreational drugs.

Officers are waiting for further toxicology tests at the end of the week which may end the mystery of how Mr Williams died.

Mr Williams, 31, a keen cyclist and maths prodigy from Anglesey, North Wales, was found dead in the MI6 flat in central London where he lived while he was on secondment from GCHQ, working on interception techniques and code-breaking.

The death has puzzled Scotland Yard detectives and Home Office pathologists who have yet to come up with a definite cause of death.

The body was badly decomposed making it difficult to be certain whether there was a lack of oxygen to the brain or heart failure.

There are no marks on the body, making strangulation unlikely, but asphyxiation remains a possibility.

Strangulation has become increasingly common as a sex game, but officers say they have never come across a case like this linked to sex.

Mr Williams’s family have been upset at suggestions that he was gay and at erroneous reports that bondage equipment was found in the flat.

One source close to the inquiry told The Daily Telegraph: “If you are looking at how he died, asphyxiation could be one of the answers.

“We are looking at whether he could have been in the bag alive. The majority of people wouldn’t have thought that was likely but nothing is impossible.

“It is unlikely that his clothes were removed after he died so we have to assume that he was naked when he died.”

Officers believe that someone else was involved in the death – even if it does not amount to murder – although there was no sign of forced entry at the flat.

“You would never say that he did this to himself. How would you do it?” the source said. “We have looked at whether it is possible to lock the bag from the inside and it just does not seem possible. “

Detectives are keen to talk to a Mediterranean couple aged between 20 and 30, seen at the spy’s flat in Alderney Street, Pimlico, central London, late one evening in June or July.

“They haven’t come forward and we have to ask ourselves why that would be,” the source said.

There were reports yesterday that Mr Williams had met a similar couple at the Patisserie Valerie in Holland Park, west London on a number of occasions.

Officers are still looking at fast-acting poisons such as strychnine and arsenic but have ruled out slower acting substances such as thallium or the radioactive Polonium 210 that killed the former KGB spy Alexander Litvinenko, because CCTV images a few days before Mr Williams died showed he was in good health.

The state of decomposition of the body suggests that Mr Williams died shortly after he was last seen in Holland Park on August 14 and shopping in Harrods in Knightsbridge on August 15.

Daily Mail : Mystery of meetings with couple in a cafe five miles from home

Mystery of meetings with couple in a cafe five miles from home [scroll down]

By ABUL TAHER and IAN GALLAGHER | September 12, 2010

Gareth Williams had a series of mysterious meetings at a cafe in the weeks leading up to his death.

Witnesses said the MI6 codebreaker’s late-morning encounters at Patisserie Valerie in Holland Park, West London, took place twice a week and never lasted longer than a few minutes.

Mr Williams, who lived five miles away in Pimlico, usually met a man and a dark-haired woman in their early 30s, although the man occasionally turned up alone.

Polish waitress Magdalena Kolakowska, 24, recalled that Mr Williams would sit at the back of the dimly lit cafe ‘so he could keep an eye on the door’.

Ordering an Americano coffee, he then ‘waited for the couple to approach his table and speak to him’. Miss Kolakowska added: ‘They would come up to him as if they had suddenly just seen him and say, “Hi.” They would speak to him for two or three minutes and go. They would never sit down or have a coffee with him.’

In all, she recalls about eight such encounters. She could not remember any items passing between them and heard nothing of their conversations because all three spoke in low voices.

But it was the brevity of the meetings – coupled with their regularity – that struck staff as odd. They assumed that Mr Williams, who was dressed casually, was local.

Last week, police announced they were seeking a man and a woman, both of Mediterranean appearance, who called at Mr Williams’ home late one evening in June or July.

Although the man and woman at the cafe are roughly the same age as the couple being sought by police, staff say they did not look Mediterranean.

Patisserie Valerie is next to Holland Park Underground station, where Mr Williams was caught on CCTV on August 14, some 24 hours before he was last seen alive.

Inquiries by this newspaper have established that he visited Holland Park up to four times a week in the two months before his death.

Besides Patisserie Valerie, he went to other cafes and was seen at a nearby Hilton Hotel. He invariably arrived on his bicycle and was always seen between 10am and 1pm.

Holland Park is primarily an upmarket residential district, although a number of countries, including Russia and Uzbekistan, maintain embassies there.

Another Polish waitress at Patisserie Valerie, 29-year-old Susana Ribeiro, also recalled seeing Mr Williams there – the last occasion just after he had returned from a holiday in the US on August 11.

‘If he wasn’t sitting inside at the back, he would park his bike at the lamp-post, sit at the middle table outside and have a coffee,’ she said.

Miss Kolakowska added: ‘Some days he would bring a device with him that looked like an Apple iPad, but was much bigger, and he would watch news or some moving picture on it.’

Vanessa Riley, a pensioner in her 60s who lives in a flat behind Holland Park station, said she saw Mr Williams in two other cafes near the station over the summer.

Mrs Riley became so concerned after she heard of his death she reported what she saw to police. ‘All I can say is I saw him meeting people at these cafes,’ she said.

Last night police refused to be drawn on the significance of the sightings.

Detectives have already tracked Mr Williams’ movements to Holland Park, apparently by checking his journeys on his Oyster ticket, the plastic travel card commuters use on the Underground.

They took away CCTV footage from 29 different cameras at Holland Park station and have since released footage of Mr Williams arriving at the station on August 14 and, the following day, shopping in Harrods.

There were reports yesterday that Mr Williams’ family, upset at the slow progress of the police investigation into his death, want to commission their own post-mortem examination.

Meanwhile, security sources said that Mr Williams was recruited by GCHQ after it became aware of his ‘extraordinary prowess at computer games’.

‘He was achieving rare high scores on these espionage and war games that are played on the internet,’ said a source. ‘I know it sounds daft, but this is how he was discovered.’

Two years ago, GCHQ ran an advertising campaign in online games, including Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell Double Agent, to tempt web-savvy graduates to become spies.