- Final agony of RAF volunteer killed by sarin - in Britain.
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- As the inquest into the death of a 'human guinea pig'
at Porton Down opens, a witness breaks 50 years' silence to recount the
horrors he saw...
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- Like most 19-year-olds, Alfred Thornhill had never seen
anybody die. When the fresh-faced trainee engineer from Salford answered
his call for National Service, he thought he could handle anything.
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- Dispatched to the ambulance service, the self-confident
teenager arrived for a month-long posting at Porton Down, the Government's
top-secret chemical weapons laboratory in Wiltshire. He was proud to be
doing his bit for his country.
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- But nothing could have prepared the young Mancunian for
the horrific events he witnessed on a May morning in 1953. Answering an
emergency call, he witnessed scenes which would haunt him for half a century
and thrust him to the centre of an inquiry into one of the darkest hours
of British military history.
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- Until today Thornhill - now a 70-year-old pensioner -
has never spoken publicly about what he saw. He feared the Ministry of
Defence would send him to prison.
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- He has now broken his silence to tell of the day he arrived
at Porton Down's gas chamber and saw the convulsing body of 20-year-old
Ronald Maddison thrashing around on the floor, spewing substances from
his mouth.
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- Thornhill's eyewitness testimony will form a key plank
of the reopened inquest into Maddison's death, which is due to be heard
in the next few weeks.
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- Maddison, an RAF engineer from County Durham, had been
used as a human guinea pig by MoD scientists experimenting on the lethal
nerve gas sarin. Like hundreds of others from the armed forces, Maddison
had volunteered for the trials, believing he was going to Porton Down to
take part in some 'mild' experiments to find a cure for the common cold.
Instead, by dropping sarin onto Maddison's skin, they used him to help
determine the dosage of the lethal nerve agents.
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- Thornhill's accounts of the agonising last hours of Maddison's
life shines a light into the murky past of this secretive establishment
and the shocking experiments carried out on volunteers. Hundreds are suspected
of dying prematurely or going on to develop illnesses such as cancer, motor
neurone disease and Parkinson's. Despite the grief and fury of survivors
and their families, over the decades successive Governments have sought
to bury the scandal. But Thornhill's testimony could change all that.
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- 'I had never seen anyone die before and what that lad
went through was absolutely horrific... it was awful,' he said. 'It was
like he was being electrocuted, his whole body was convulsing. I have seen
somebody suffer an epileptic fit, but you have never seen anything like
what happened to that lad... the skin was vibrating and there was all this
terrible stuff coming out of his mouth... it looked like frogspawn or tapioca.'
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- Thornhill recalls a number of scientists standing around
Maddison. 'You could see the panic in their eyes - one guy looked as if
he was trying to hold his head down. There were four of us who picked him
off the floor and put him in the back of the ambulance. He was still having
these violent convulsions and we drove him to the medical unit at Porton.'
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- By the time he reached the unit, it had been cleared
of other casualties and there were men in white coats standing around a
bed.
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- Thornhill was told to carry Maddison over and it was
then that the young ambulance driver saw a second image that would haunt
him for decades.
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- 'I saw his leg rise up from the bed and I saw his skin
begin turning blue. It started from the ankle and started spreading up
his leg. It was like watching somebody pouring a blue liquid into a glass,
it just began filling up. I was standing by the bed gawping. It was like
watching something from outer space and then one of the doctors produced
the biggest needle I had ever seen. It was the size of a bicycle pump and
went down onto the lad's body. The sister saw me gawping and told me to
get out.'
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- The next day Thornhill was 'devastated' when he was told
by a medical officer that the young man had died. He recalls the whole
medical unit stinking of Dettol as if it had been sprayed everywhere to
decontaminate the rooms. Thornhill was asked to drive the body to the mortuary
at Salford General Hospital and instructed to take the back roads.
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- At the time, Thornhill was suspicious of what had happened
and why he was told to take such a strange route to the hospital, but he
simply followed orders.
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- 'There was a lot of talk among the squaddies about nerve
gas and mustard gas and the like, but nobody really knew what was going
on. In those days you trusted the authorities and didn't ask too many questions.
You kept yourself to yourself.'
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- There was another reason why Thornhill kept quiet. 'I
was called into an office and read the riot act by a medical officer. He
made me sign something and told me if I ever spoke a word about what I
saw at Porton Down I would be sent to prison. I was frightened and didn't
want to go to jail, so I didn't tell any of the other lads what I had seen.'
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- Over the years, Thornhill has had frequent flashbacks
of the terrible events he witnessed, but has never mentioned them outside
his immediate family. 'I used to see things on the news and on TV that
used to bring it all back to me. I remember seeing the news about Saddam
Hussein gassing the Kurds and I couldn't stop thinking about that young
lad.'
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- For 50 years, Thornhill found it difficult to stop wondering
who the dying man was. 'I noticed his blue RAF trousers under the blue
boiler suit, but that's all I ever never knew about him. I thought he might
be married and his wife or parents would want to know what happened and
that there was somebody with him when he died. I was recently engaged and
I would have hoped somebody would have done the same for me.'
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- Yet it was only this summer when he heard a report on
a local Manchester radio station about a police inquiry into the death
of the RAF engineer Ronald Maddison at Porton Down, that it all fitted
into place. 'I stopped in my tracks when I heard it. I knew that was it
him, that it was Maddison. It was the right date, he was in the RAF and
they said it was the only person who had died at Porton.'
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- Thornhill telephoned the Wiltshire police who were conducting
the inquiry and a team travelled to Manchester the next day to interview
him. He gave them a nine-page statement detailing all he knew and saw at
Porton Down during his time there. An original MoD inquest was held in
secret in 1953 and recorded a verdict of death by misadventure.
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- Although the police inquiry into events at Porton Down
found insufficient evidence to mount a criminal prosecution, their findings
were passed to Lord Chief Justice Woolf who ruled that the inquest must
be reopened. Lawyers for Maddison's family and the hundreds of other volunteers
who have suffered subsequent illnesses are hoping for a verdict of 'unlawful
killing'.
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- Thornhill now wants to meet Maddison's family so he can
talk to them about what he saw. 'What that lad went through was horrendous,
it shouldn't have been allowed to happen to anybody. We talk about Saddam
Hussein gassing his own people but what we did at Porton Down was the same...
I want his family to have some justice.'
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- With Thornhill now ready to speak out 50 years later,
Maddison's family might finally be able to get just that.
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- Race to test a Cold War killer
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- Porton Down was established as a research centre on the
edge of Salisbury Plain in 1916, to help Britain catch up with German chemical
weapons technology.
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- By the time Alfred Thornhill was an ambulance driver
there in 1953, British intelligence believed the Soviets were stockpiling
nerve agents, such as sarin, which could kill instantly or cause paralysis,
convulsions and breathing difficulties. Scientists at Porton Down wanted
to know the precise doses to cause such symptoms.
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- From 1945 more than 3,000 men were sent into the gas
chamber; various amounts of liquid nerve gas were dripped by pipette onto
their arms. Many believed they were helping to find a cure for the common
cold.
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- Ronald Maddison died 45 minutes after 200mg of the deadly
nerve agent sarin was dripped onto a patch of uniform on his arm.The coroner's
report was never released but Lord Chief Justice Woolf has now ordered
a fresh inquest.
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- http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,6903,1051293,00.html
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- Comment
- From Mary
- 9-28-3
- Maybe someone should mention that the chief ingredient
in sarin is methyl phosphonyl DIFLUORIDE.
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