After the Met was accused of a “cop out” on failing to investigate the Nuked Blood cover-up, victims of the Post Office scandal and the Hillsborough tragedy have joined veterans to urge ministers to intervene
Survivors of multiple tragedies and state cover-ups have thrown their weight behind a plea from nuclear veterans for the Met Police to investigate crimes by the British state against its own troops.
Former sub postmaster Lee Castleton, Hillsborough campaigner Margaret Aspinall and the parents of Zane Gbangbola, who were wrongly blamed for his death after hydrogen cyanide from an old dump leaked into their home during floods, have all called on the Policing Minister and Victims Commissioner to intervene.
They are joined by members of the Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice campaign, and 100 nuclear veterans, widows, wives and descendants, demanding the Met be told to investigate a complaint about a criminal cover-up at the highest levels of the Establishment.
The Mirror reported yesterday how officers had refused to consider 500 pages of evidence about wrongdoing at the Ministry of Defence, and passed the complaint instead to another force.
Steve Purse, who has been unlawfully denied access to blood tests taken from his dad during a series of toxic plutonium experiments in the Outback, said: “It feels like they’re refusing to look over the garden fence in case it upsets the neighbours.”
Despite documents which appear to show people still working today in Westminster misled ministers, courts, and Parliament as recently as 2024, the Met decided it was “non-recent” and not in their jurisdiction. They referred it to Thames Valley Police, on the grounds that the Atomic Weapons Establishment is in Berkshire.
“It is our view that, after reviewing the evidence, TVP will simply refer it back to the Met, and there will be a game of official ping-pong while the veterans of these tests, who have an average age of 87 and more than 9 chronic health conditions each, die at the rate of one a week,” say campaigners.
“We appreciate that it’s a very unwelcome complaint with many political ramifications, but it is a vital one if our country is to remain a place of justice and freedom, if our veterans are to get the correct medical diagnosis and treatment, and our future troops can have full faith in the duty of care displayed by those in charge of the armed forces.”
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The Nuked Blood Scandal blew open in 2022 after the discovery of a memo between atomic weapons scientists discussing the ” gross irregularity” in the blood of Group Captain Terry Gledhill, who had flown repeated missions through the mushroom clouds to gather samples.
It has since led to the discovery of dozens of orders for blood testing, covering thousands of men in all three armed forces, and Commonwealth troops and civilians, for more than a decade. Veterans have found the results are now missing from their records. Some have been found on a secret database at the AWE, which ministers have ordered to be published.
But there is also evidence that officials covered up the monitoring. In 2018, Parliament was told the MoD “holds no information” about blood tests. 2022, the AWE said it held “one blood test for one member of service personnel”. And in repeated court cases, lawyers who should have had access to the AWE files told judges they had seen no evidence of such information.
Last year, officials drafted responses from ministers in letters and Parliament claiming that the AWE held no medical records. Yet when 4,000 pages from the AWE were released, they contained blood tests, blood data, and completed medical record forms, as well as faxes between officials agreeing “lines to take” with ministers and the press that blood tests were never done.
The campaigners have written to Policing Minister Diana Johnson, Victims Commissioner Baroness Helen Newlove, Mayor of London Sadiq Khan and London Victims Commissioner Clare Waxman to urge them to raise the case with Met Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley.
Their letter asks the minister and others to “ensure that our case is assessed and investigated as a criminal allegation of national importance, centred on Whitehall, and that all the appropriate resources are given to it for that investigation to be both rapid and thorough”.
The Home Office was approached for comment.