Murder of Yvonne Fletcher - Ballistics Controversy

Ballistics Controversy

The official inquest concluded that WPC Fletcher was killed by someone firing a 9mm calibre automatic weapon from a lower floor in the Libyan embassy. But this verdict has been disputed by a number of experts, including the British Army's senior ballistics officer Lieutenant Colonel George Styles and Home Office pathologist Hugh Thomas. On 24 June 1997, Tam Dalyell MP questioned Prime Minister Tony Blair about the death of Yvonne Fletcher. Dalyell made particular reference to a Channel 4 documentary about the murder:

With the agreement of Queenie Fletcher, her mother, I raised with the Home Office the three remarkable programmes that were made by Fulcrum, and their producer, Richard Bellfield, called Murder In St. James's. Television speculation is one thing, but this was rather more than that, because on film was George Styles, the senior ballistics officer in the British Army, who said that, as a ballistics expert, he believed that the WPC could not have been killed from the second floor of the Libyan embassy, as was suggested.

Also on film was my friend, Hugh Thomas, who talked about the angles at which bullets could enter bodies, and the position of those bodies. Hugh Thomas was, for years, the consultant surgeon of the Royal Victoria hospital in Belfast, and I suspect he knows more about bullets entering bodies than anybody else in Britain. Above that was Professor Bernard Knight, who, on and off, has been the Home Office pathologist for 25 years. When Bernard Knight gives evidence on film that the official explanation could not be, it is time for an investigation.

A major issue is the discrepancy in the bullet trajectory noted by the pathologist who examined the body of Yvonne Fletcher. Dr. Ian West wrote in his initial post mortem report she was shot from the upper floors of an adjacent building because "the angle of wound was between 60 and 70 degrees". However at the official inquest Dr. West stated her wounds were "entirely consistent with a shot fired from the first floor window of the Embassy, an angle of 15 degrees."