Inquiry into Hutton leak to the Sun fails to find culprit

by Gordon MacMillan,, Brand Republic 11-Aug-04, 12:00

LONDON – An investigation into who leaked the Hutton report to the Sun has been unable to reveal the newspaper's source.

Key findings of the Hutton report, which investigated the events surrounding the death of Dr David Kelly, the Ministry of Defence scientist, were splashed over the front page of the Sun ahead of the document's official publication at the High Court.

The Sun revealed that Tony Blair had been cleared of any wrongdoing, Geoff Hoon, the defence secretary, was off the hook and revealed the BBC was found to be at fault over Andrew Gilligan's Radio 4 story on the Iraq dossier.

Lord Hutton slammed the leak, calling it deplorable, and said an investigation would be launched.

"I wish to state that I deplore the reporting of some of the conclusions of my report by a newspaper this morning," Lord Hutton said when the report was leaked in January.

The inquiry said that after a "full and careful investigation" it could not discover the source and was also unable to find particular weaknesses in the guarding of the report.

An inquiry statement said: "Lord Hutton asked the solicitor to the inquiry to conduct an investigation to try to discover the source of the leak. The solicitor carried out a full and careful investigation but was unable to discover the source."

The details of the report had been closely guarded and only the key players -- Downing Street, the BBC and Dr Kelly's family -- were given copies 24 hours before publication.

When the story appeared in the Sun, Number 10 was accused of leaking the information and trying to spin the story to cast the government in a favourable light.

However, Downing Street denied it was responsible. The BBC also denied leaking the report, which resulted in the departure of Greg Dyke, the director-general, and Gavyn Davies, the chairman.

The Sun claimed it had not seen the report but had been told the key findings over the phone by an "impartial" source.

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