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UK police investigate nuclear 'guinea pig' claim |
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| UK: January 1, 2002 | ||
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LONDON - British police said on Friday they were investigating a complaint that military personnel were intentionally exposed by the government to deadly levels of radiation during nuclear tests on Pacific islands in the 1950s.
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"I can confirm that the Met specialist crime group is carrying out a preliminary assessment of information received by them in August 2001," a spokesman for London's Metropolitan Police Service in reply to a question about the nuclear tests. He declined to give further details or estimate when the investigations might be completed. A police source said the investigation was prompted by the widow of a Royal Air Force pilot, Squadron Leader Eric Denson, who had been ordered to fly his plane several times through the mushroom cloud from a nuclear bomb detonated on Christmas Island in the Pacific in 1958. "The claim is that he...clearly in effect was being used as a human guinea pig," Shirley Denson's lawyer Alan Care told BBC radio. Newspapers said Denson fell ill after the flight and became depressed, and committed suicide in 1976 after three attempts. Several thousand British service personnel took part in the nuclear tests at Christmas Island and other Pacific atolls in the 1950s. Protective equipment was scarce as full knowledge of the deadly effects of radiation sickness was only slowly coming to light after the nuclear bombs dropped by the United States on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. In the 20 years after the British tests many of the participants began complaining of illnesses they said were related to the radiation exposure.
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REUTERS NEWS SERVICE
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