Sixth scientist found dead

Press, 7 April 1987, Page 1

Sixth scientist found dead

NZPA-PA London A sixth scientist doing defence work for the British Government has been found dead, according to a police spokesman. A lecturer, Mr Peter Peapell, aged 46, died on February 22 from carbon monoxide poisoning. A Thames Valley police spokesman, said Mr Peapell was found beneath his car in the garage at his Oxfordshire home. The car engine was running and the garage door was shut An inquest recorded an open verdict, the spokesman said. “No more inquiries are

going on at the moment,” he said. An open verdict is recorded when the evidence does not “fully or further” disclose the means by which the cause of death arose, according to Coroners’ rules. An inquest cannot be reopened without application to the High Court or by application for judicial review, but a spokesman for Alliance Defence, Mr John Cartwright, said he believed there were grounds for concern and the police should reinvestigate Mr Peapell’s “worrying” death. Mr Cartwright, who last

week called for an inquiry into the deaths of the scientists, said, “I would have thought that as a matter of sheer prudence it would be the sensible thing to do in this case.” Even if all the cases were individual suicides, he said it had to raise questions about the pressures under which scientists were working in the defence field. Mr Peapell, a lecturer at the Royal Military Coliege of Science near Swindon in south-west England, specialised in metallurgy and part of his research work was secret, like five other scientists

who died and one who disappeared. The British Home Secretary, Mr Douglas Hurd, has ordered the police to liaise over the deaths, but there has been no hint yet of a Government inquiry. The college is a centre of education for the Army and is used “as a source of knowledge and reference for technology and science as applied to war,” the Ministry of Defence said. A Ministry spokesman said Mr Peapell worked as a Ministry of Defence scientist until 1984, but transferred after a re-

organisation. He did not know exactly what his work involved or what level of classification it had. The other five scientists who died were: Keith Bowden, a computer scientist, who died when his car crashed on to a disused railway line in Essex in 1982. Vimal Dajibhai, a computer engineer, plunged from the Clifton suspension bridge in Bnstol in August, 1986. Small puncture marks were found on his buttocks. Richard Pugh, a computer design expert, was found dead in his home in Essex in January, 1987.

David Sands, a researcher with the Mar-coni-owned company, Easams, died when his car, loaded with petrol, crashed into a cafe and burst into flames outside Winchester, Hampshire, last Monday. Ashad Sharif, who worked for Marconi, died after driving away with one end of a rope tied to his neck and the other to a tree. A seventh scientist, Aytar Singh Gida, who was researching submarine warfare at Loughborough University in the Midlands, disappeared in January this year. ■