Arrest follows mercy killer's confession

He promised viewers the confession he was about to make would be "rather startling". And so it proved.

Ray Gosling, pioneering gay rights campaigner and veteran broadcaster, revealed in a BBC news programme how one hot afternoon some years ago he smothered a former lover to death as he lay in hospital suffering unimaginable pain and beyond the reach of medicalhelp.

Last night, police arrested him on suspicion of murder.

They did not name Gosling when announmcing the arrest, but said it followed comments on the BBC's Inside Out' programme.

Earlier yesterday, detectives from the Nottinghamshire police homicide unit visited the production offices where the documentary Journey of Death, exploring the culture surrounding mortality, was made.

In his emotional confession, made as he strolled through a graveyard, Gosling, 70, refused to reveal the name of the man or say when the mercy killing took place.

The lack of detail will make the investigation difficult for police. So will the broadcaster's insistence yesterday that he would disclose no more information no matter how hard he was pressed.

"No, no, no. No way, no way, no way. It is nobody's business. It was a private pact," he said.

The man had an Aids-related illness and had asked Gosling to end his life should his suffering become too much to bear.

He was not Gosling's partner, Bryn Allsop, whom the broadcaster nursed through pancreatic cancer to his death several years later.

It is understood the incident happened in the early 1980s when HIV was a little-talked about or understood condition.

But Gosling insisted he was not about to become a spokesman for the cause of assisted dying.

"I just want people to get on with living their lives as fully as possible for as long as they are still alive. But when you are in that much pain though it is not really a life."

He explained he had been moved to tell his own secret after listening to the candid stories told to him by his interview subjects for the documentary series Inside Out. Other recent topics for his work have also been highly personal and he has spoken about his spiral into debt and his battle against the stigma of old age.

While his actions in helping his lover to die were inspired by compassion, Gosling said he believed the practice to be common in the medical profession.

"Sometimes doctors do it on their own. Sometimes people do it on their own. And if it happens to a lover or friend of yours, a husband, a wife, and I hope it doesn't but when it does, sometimes you have to do brave things and you have to say - to use Nottingham language - bugger the law."

The BBC said it would co-operate fully with the police investigation.

- INDEPENDENT