Mystery deepens over Vienna UN death

By David Rogers

A British nuclear expert who fell from the 17th floor of a United Nations building did not commit suicide and may have been hurled to his death, says a doctor who carried out a second post-mortem examination.

Timothy Hampton, 47, a scientist involved in monitoring nuclear activity, was found dead last week at the bottom of a stairwell in Vienna.

An initial autopsy concluded that there were "no suspicious circumstances". But it is understood that Mr Hampton�s widow Olena Gryshcuk and her family were deeply unhappy with that verdict.

Now a doctor who undertook a second post-mortem examination on behalf of the family believes she has found evidence that Mr Hampton did not die by his own hands.

Professor Kathrin Yen, of the Ludwig Boltzmann Forensic Institute in Graz, Austria, which specialises in traumatology research, told the Mail on Sunday she had more tests to complete on Mr Hampton, who had a three-year-old son with Ms Gryshcuk.

But she said one possible theory was that Mr Hampton was carried to the 17th floor from his workplace on the sixth floor and thrown to his death.

Professor Yen used new forensic techniques to detect internal bruising caused by strangulation which would not be visible to the eye.

She told the Mail on Sunday : �In my opinion, it does not look like suicide. My example is that somebody took him up to the top floor and took him down.

"At the moment I don�t have the police reports. We did a CT scan. From the external exam, I saw injuries on the neck but these were not due to strangulation."

It is expected to take three weeks for blood test results to come back. Austrian police said they believe Mr Hampton committed suicide.

He had been working for the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organisation (CTBTO) at the UN building and the Austrian Times has been told that Mr Hampton may have been involved in talks discussing nuclear testing in Iran. The UN has strongly denied the claims, although Mr Hampton's title - processing engineer - meant he was "part of the team maintaining and operating the International Data Centre Division application software to generate and distribute data products and services to CTBTOs 182 Member States".

This meant he was responsible for monitoring a vast array of technical data from hundreds of monitoring stations around the world in the hope of discovering any illegal nuclear activity - including Iran. In fact although CTBTO officials were reluctant to admit it, of the 300 plus monitoring stations set up globally there are at least two in the geographical area of Iran sending data back to Vienna.

In addition both the CTBTO and the IAEA that organised the recent Iran talks are in the same complex - the IAEA occupies A and B buildings while the CTBTO is in E building - both are covering the same subject matter.

Mr Hampton's body was discovered last Tuesday at about 8am. Friends said it was usual for him to work late into the night. His widow, an inspector for the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), was working in Japan when her husband died.

A source close to the family said life had not been easy for Mr Hampton, who was often away from his wife and son.

But the source added that he was �not the suicide type�. He said: �Tim was rather introverted. He changed his life many times.�

Trained in Britain as a bio-chemist, Mr Hampton worked in a bio-lab before moving into construction.

He then worked on nuclear test-ban projects before joining the UN in 1998, said the CTBTO.

The IAEA, an independent and separate organisation, inspects nuclear plants worldwide and is based in the building next to the CTBTO in Vienna.

Under a year ago, an American died at the IAEA in strikingly similar circumstances, his body being found at the bottom of a stairwell.

A UN spokeswoman said an investigation into that case continues, though Austrian police have concluded it was suicide.

She said: "This might have been a copycat thing in the CTBTO."

Austrian Times

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bill wrote on 16. 12. 2009 from vienna

you seem to forget the possibility he was killed because he discovered not nuclear secrets but secrets of corruption or falsified documents or something of this sort.

Reply
Medawar wrote on 05. 11. 2009 from Bedford UK

Omar: It would only actually be worth killing Dr Hampton to keep something secret, if that secret was sufficiently surprising not to be guessed pretty soon after he hit the floor. Anything to do with a nuclear test in Iran or North Korea, would not in the current circumstances, surprise anyone. Evidence of a covert nuclear test in Latin America, for example, would be a whole new ball game. Medawar isn't stupid, but given the numbers of people already trying to do him harm, a few newcomers won't matter. It's always possible that they will trip each other up. Which brings us back to the possibility that there might have been more than one group with eyes on Dr Hampton and therefore evidence of what happened, should they chose to use it.

Reply
Omar el Kaban wrote on 05. 11. 2009 from Yerevan

And you my friend are not very bright!

Reply
Medawar wrote on 02. 11. 2009 from Bedford UK

When the Daily Mail printed a letter of mine, taking issue with the largely complacent analysis that the first North Korean nuclear test was "crude" or "a failure" a very smartly dressed Korean couple started taking an interest in my house by lunchtime on the day of publication. Unlike the local animal rights crowd, they made no attempt to do any harm, so I ignored them and they didn't reappear. However, it was a response, and a very prompt one, simply to an analysis of what was in the public domain at the time. If the resources exist to send at least two people to check out someone just for writing a letter to a newspaper, then it's probable that someone like Dr Hampton could have been under more or less permanent surveillance. If the North Koreans didn't do it, they almost certainly saw who did.

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