Fatal-fall inquiry urged

Press, 18 May 1984, Page 6

Fatal-fall inquiry urged

NZPA-Reuter London The British Government has been called on to order a fresh inquiry into the death of a British banker with Soviet Intelligence links after an inquest decided yesterday that he had been pushed out of the window of his Moscow flat.

Dennis Skinner, representative of Britain’s Midland Bank in the Soviet capital, was found dead on June 17 last year. Only 48 hours earlier he had told British officials that his life was in danger and that a Soviet spy had infiltrated the British Embassy in Moscow, the south London inquest jury heard.

It returned a verdict of unlawful killing, in contrast to a decision by the Moscow

prosecutor that the fatal fall had not been a result of criminal actions.

The Labour Party immediately called on the Foreign Office to make fresh inquiries into the banker’s death.

Donald Anderson, Labour’s foreign affairs spokesman, tabled a Parliamentary question asking the Foreign Secretary, Sir Geoffrey Howe, what would be done in the light of the verdict.

“This surprising result leaves the whole case very open indeed and, at the Moscow end, the need for very many questions to be pursued by the Foreign Office,” he said.

Mr Skinner’s Soviet-born wife, Lyudmilla, said during

the inquest that her husband had had links with Soviet and British Intelligence. According to evidence given by British Embassy officials during the threeday inquest Mr Skinner had been under pressure from the Soviet K.G.B. security police to make his wife leave Britain and return to Moscow.

One diplomat said that Mr Skinner had telephoned him on the morning of his death and said, “The charge is espionage and they’re going to keep me like a cabbage to enable them to control my wife.” Mrs Skinner, aged 39, said that she now feared for her own life after evidence was given that she had thwarted K.G.B. operations for more

than 13 years. “You have put a bullet in my head,” she said.

The jury was told that Mr Skinner, who was 54, had asked a neighbour to tell his embassy about the spy in its midst and give him protection.

“For God’s sake do this or I am dead." Two days later his body was found in the street beneath his llth-floor flat.

Summing up the case the Coroner, Dr Mary McHugh, said that it had been a chilling story. “It’s a strange coincidence that death should have called on him so shortly after writing this note.”

The Foreign Office refused to comment on the case.