The town's newspaper, the Shropshire Star, has claimed, in a piece which we reprint on Page 3, that we have made a "gigantic leap from a very personal tragedy .. to talk of a murdering conspiracy". The Sun has written, not one, but two editorials accusing this newspaper of running a campaign to assert the two men were murdered by a white gang.So The Independent would like to spell out the nature of our concern in the McGowan case. This newspaper has been criticised from a number of quarters over our coverage of the case. And no one knows whether Harold's nephew Jason took his own life by hanging himself from a low railing on New Year's Eve or whether he, too, was murdered when he got too close to discovering the truth about his uncle's death. But the facts as The Independent has reported them during the past five days require those investigating the strange hangings to approach their sombre task with an open mind.
Yet that is the one thing which seems to have been singularly lacking - as Scotland Yard's racial and violent crimes squad has now confirmed - in the approach which the West Mercia police have so far taken to the case.They are not alone in that. No one knows whether Harold McGowan committed suicide or died at the hands of the racists who had been threatening him for months. There were four tests after that and for those we didn't even get the white suits.I was pensioned out of the army at the age of 21 ... The British government were well aware of the dangers of radiation but they never protected us.".
No one knows whether Harold McGowan committed suicide or died at the hands of the racists who had been threatening him for months. And no one knows whether Harold's nephew Jason took his own life by hanging himself from a low railing on New Year's Eve or whether he, too, was murdered when he got too close to discovering the truth about his uncle's death. But in 1993 Mr McGinley and Mr Egan claimed in Strasbourg that subsequent health problems they suffered were caused by the nuclear explosions. Both had first lodged claims for war pensions which were rejected by the Department of Social Security.Mr Egan, who has suffered lung problems since the tests said yesterday: "They have turned us down again, but to me they are guilty and other countries have paid their troops for the damage that was done to them. He said: "All they gave us was white overalls, we were never told anything about the dangers of radiation.
I had to stop work when I was only 42 because of ill health...we were just used as guinea pigs."Mr McGinley, national chairman of the Association of Nuclear Test Veterans, developed serious illnesses including cancer following the tests, which happened when he was 19. "The court found that those facts could reasonably have been known to the applicants prior to the delivery of the original judgment," they said.In November 1957 and September 1958 when Britain carried out its tests at Christmas Island in the Pacific Ocean, Mr McGinley was serving in the Army on the island and Mr Egan, of the Royal Navy, was stationed on a ship near by.During the tests, military personnel were ordered to line up in the open and face away from the explosions with their eyes closed and covered until at least 20 seconds after the blast. The two men claim servicemen were deliberately exposed to radiation for experimental purposes. However, the Government insists that there was no experimentation and that the purpose of the line-up was to ensure the men avoided eye damage and injury caused by material blown about by the blast.In any event, the Government says, those involved were sufficiently far from the centre of the detonations to avoid exposure to radiation "at any harmful level".No record exists of the degree of radiation exposure, if any, of the servicemen involved. A LONG-RUNNING legal battle over British nuclear tests in the Pacific during the Fifties ended in failure yesterday for two former servicemen who claimed they were illegally exposed to radiation. Human rights judges in Strasbourg, who had already ruled that the government of the day did not breach the European Human Rights Convention by conducting six atmospheric tests of nuclear weapons in the presence of military personnel, rejected an appeal yesterday by the two men to reopen the case.Kenneth McGinley, 61, of Johnstone, Renfrewshire, and Edward Egan, 60, from Glasgow, had claimed there was new evidence to be considered which was not available at the time of the original ruling against them in June 1998.But yesterday, by five votes to two, the judges refused to look at information the men said could help to establish whether they could have made successful claims for compensation for health problems they blamed on exposure to radiation.
