Eighty-eight deaths have been tied to an alleged “poison seller” in Canada who has been accused by British police of participating in assisted suicide.
“Our deepest sympathies are with the loved ones of those who have died. They are being supported by specially trained officers from police forces,” the U.K.’s National Crime Agency (NCA) deputy director Craig Turner told reporters. “In consultation with the Crown Prosecution Service, the NCA has taken the decision to conduct an investigation into potential criminal offenses committed in the U.K. This operation is underway.”
Fifty-seven-year-old Kenneth Law, a resident of Mississauga, was arrested by Peel Regional Police in Ontario, Canada, in May, on charges related to an investigation involving the sale of a poisonous substance.
A police report says the police believe that Law “distributed and marketed the substance online to target individuals at risk of self-harm.” His victims allegedly include people in the U.K., Canada and the U.S.
Police in Canada charged him with two counts of counseling or aiding suicide, but British police believe he has connections to far more deaths.
Law’s connection to the deaths was reported by The Times U.K. in April, just weeks before he was arrested. At the time, The Times had connected him to as many as seven deaths, four of which were in Britain.
An undercover reporter had posed as a “suicidal buyer” to Law who told them that his customers told him he was doing “God’s work” and that he claimed to have sold his product to “hundreds” of British people.
He claimed that he had started his business after his mother suffered “greatly” from a stroke because his father was “religious” and “didn’t believe very much in euthanasia at all.” He claimed to have also sold the substance to people in “other parts of the world.”
Now, the NCA has opened an investigation into Law’s possible connection to 88 deaths, with police making welfare visits to hundreds of possible buyers, the BBC reported.
Peel Regional Police Deputy Chief Marc Andrews said the force is “aware of 1,200 packages that have been shipped” to “over 40 countries” and urged people who received those packages to contact suicide hotlines and police. Law reportedly denied the accusations when contacted for comment in May.
Assisted suicide is illegal in the U.K. and Canada, with a punishment of up to 14 years in prison in both countries, according to The Times, which was responsible for alerting Canadian authorities to Law’s operation after confirming its existence through a website designed to hide the truth of what he was doing.
When confronted by reporters, Law insisted that he was “not assisting anything” but just “selling a product.”
The father of one victim told BBC’s Radio 4 that his son spoke with people online in communities set up to discuss taking one’s own life, lamenting that, “we have to accept that in the modern age, people can find like-minded people to discuss even the most difficult problems.”
“We need to be more sensitive around the risks that people like Tom have in society through their ability to find information online that is unchallenged,” the father said.
Law is scheduled to appear in court later this month.
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