Friday 26 November 2010

The death of David Kelly - DI Ashley Smith

Just a short note about "DI Ashleigh Smith" mentioned in Dr. Nicholas Hunt's postmortem report.

As far as I can trace no "Ashleigh" Smith was ever a member of Thames Valley Police.

I suspect that the individual concerned was, in July 2003, DI Ashley Smith.

DI Smith was later promoted to Superintendent, being a senior officer in Thames Valley Police's Professional Standards department in 2008. See here.

Other than his presence close to the scene where Dr. Kelly's body was found on 18th July 2003, I think we know nothing publicly of DI Smith's actions.

For completeness, I'll mention that Thames Valley Police also have a Police Constable Ashley Smith. At the risk of stating the obvious, PC Smith and Superintendent Smith are two different individuals.

3 comments:

  1. The name DI Smith appears here on exhibit TVP/10/0106-10, a 5 page document relating to David Broucher/F.O.

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  2. PS Are SOCO officers usually not Civilians? Do I read the text correctly that DI Ashleigh Smith is Acting Principal SOCO ?
    I also notice that the DOB used is 14 May, whereas some obituaries gave 17 May 1944.

    Finally, some sentences in the report seem to have missing full stops - as if parts have been tippexed out - normally the commas and full stops DO come out clearly in the online report.

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  3. Felix,

    I think the punctuation on the released version of the postmortem report is a little idiosyncratic.

    I think the relevant part of the PM report refers to three people:

    1. DI Ashleigh (sic) Smith
    2. Acting Principal SOCO Mark Schollar
    3. Senior SOCO John Sharpley

    A propos the missing full stops, take a look at Tim Wilkinson's transcript of the PM report here:

    http://surelysomemistake.blogspot.com/2010/10/david-kelly-pathologists-report-to.html

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