MReyn 24050
Chugalug 2
Pontius Navigator
Thank you all for your help to understand when an inquest is required. Thank you Pontius Nav for defending me against Chugalug’s charge of pomposity (to which I plead guilty, citing my age as partial mitigation.) I have sometimes to try to live up to my nom de plume.
Personally I feel that a coroner’s inquest is wholly out of place when considering combat casualties, wherever the body is repatriated. Nobody has suggested that the A10 pilot committed a deliberate act of murder. Obviously he made a terrible error and this should have been investigated strictly through military channels. If it had come to a Court Martial, the Corporal’s widow would have been entitled to attend. In the event, no disciplinary action was taken. But I should like to think that the USAF sent their Air Attaché to brief the NoK as fully as possible on what happened, and hand over a note of regret/apologies signed by a very senior officer.
The account in the Times of the inquest which described the coroner to be “shaking with anger” when told that the MOD could not release the video tape, suggests he was indeed being a bit pompous. If coroners are unaware of the details of the OSA and the cardinal rule in international intelligence relationships that only the owner can consent to release of classified material, he really ought to join the real world. I do not buy the idea that NoK are “entitled” to access all the evidence in such cases in order to achieve “closure”. Most families in WW2 and the immediate postwar world had to be content with much less.
I remember from the early ‘50s the Darlington coroner summoning the stationmaster at Middleton St George to his court and demanding that he produce the BofI reports into a series of fatal Meteor accidents , when students had “tent-pegged” into his parish. The stationmaster, a redoubtable Kiwi, aplogised politely; but the proceedings were all classified and he was not authorised to release them. The coroner threatened him with jail for contempt, but the Gp Capt stood his ground . The coroner contented himself with “shaking with anger”.