Senior staff at English hospital where Lucy Letby worked arrested on suspicion of gross negligence manslaughter
Letby, 35, is serving life in jail after being found guilty of murdering seven newborns and attempting to murder eight more between June 2015 and June 2016 while working in the neonatal unit of the Countess of Chester Hospital in northern England.
The nurse has maintained her innocence throughout but has been refused permission to appeal against her convictions.
She has been told she will never be released.
Following the trial, British police began to investigate possible corporate manslaughter offences at the hospital, an inquiry that was later widened to consider if individuals might be guilty of gross negligence manslaughter.
Detective Superintendent Paul Hughes, who is leading the investigation, said three unnamed members of the hospital's senior leadership team were arrested on Monday, local time.
They have since been released on police bail pending further inquires.
"Both the corporate manslaughter and gross negligence manslaughter elements of the investigation are continuing and there are no set timescales for these," Mr Hughes said in a statement.
He added that the police investigation into whether Letby had committed more crimes at the hospital and at another unit where she had previously worked was ongoing.
Cheshire Police said the case did not have any impact on Letby's 2023 convictions for murder and attempted murder.
Letby, who testified that she never harmed a child, has continued to proclaim her innocence, and support for her has grown as legal and scientific experts have questioned the circumstantial and statistical evidence used at her trial.
A panel of international medical experts disputed the evidence against her and her lawyer said she was wrongly convicted.
A judge who oversaw a public inquiry seeking accountability of staff and management at the hospital was expected to publish her findings later this year.
Justice Kathryn Thirlwall said at the outset of the inquiry that she would not review Letby's conviction, but would take a deeper look into how failures led to babies being repeatedly harmed at the hospital.
As that inquiry was underway earlier this year, an independent panel of more than a dozen medical experts issued a report that found no sign of a crime and concluded natural causes or bad medical care led to the demise of each of the newborns.
"In summary, then, ladies and gentlemen, we did not find any murders," Dr Shoo Lee, a retired neonatologist from Canada, said at a London news conference in February.
Letby's lawyers and three former executives at the hospital unsuccessfully petitioned Judge Thirlwall to halt the public inquiry after the medical panel released its findings.
Letby, who lost two bids to appeal her convictions, now has her case before the Criminal Case Review Commission, which reviews possible miscarriages of justice, which could lead to another shot at an appeal.
The Crown Prosecution Service has said two juries have convicted Letby and three appellate judges have rejected her arguments that the prosecution expert evidence is flawed.
Reuters/AP
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News.com.au
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Before we deal with more complicated matters let's acknowledge, without caveat, the numbskullery of a British rap duo called 'Bob Vylan'. First of all, on a note that carries no substance but bugs me nonetheless: Bob Vylan? Really? Is that ... is that allowed? We're just stealing the names of other musicians, now, and changing one letter? By that logic I could go around calling myself Chakira, and indulging in a little bum wiggle here and there, and committing tax fraud, and label it art. (That's a touch too harsh on Shakira. She did give us the second-catchiest World Cup anthem of my lifetime, and the raciest Super Bowl half time show since Janet Jackson, both of which warrant no small dividend of respect. Pay your taxes though, babe.) As for the real Vylans of the piece here. While performing at the Glastonbury music festival in Britain, the pair led chants of 'death, death to the IDF', referring to Israel's military, which were broadcast live by the BBC, and thus beamed around the world. As a general rule, surely we can agree that any sentence starting with 'death, death to' is heading in a very poor direction. 'Restraint, restraint from the IDF' may lack punch, but it also lacks any conceivable justification for, or incitement to, violence. Which is to say much of the indignation this week has been warranted. British police opened an investigation into the group, which is roughly in line with their treatment of other extreme rhetoric. Prime Minister Keir Starmer condemned them. Their agent ditched them. Shows across Europe were cancelled. The US government revoked their visas, stressing that 'foreigners who glorify violence and hatred are not welcome visitors'. (No word on whether hatred glorified by American citizens - say, members of Congress, or senior administration officials - deserves similar condemnation, but that's a whole other kettle of scalding hot water, and we shan't touch it today.) I'm not here to argue any of the backlash described above was wrong. It all ties into a broader question about how liberal societies should calibrate their restrictions on free speech, and across 34 years of life I have never yet encountered a perfect answer. You're fumbling around for the least objectionable border between irreconcilable rights. Not easy. You can sense the looming 'but'. I am here to wonder why these loathsome words, from a pair of formerly quasi-famous rappers - (I'm not quite deficient enough in self-awareness to call them nobodies) - are being treated as more outrageous, and worthier of action, than the daily, continuing tide of actual violence, and actual death, in Gaza. You don't go to any music festival in search of sophisticated views on foreign policy. There's a rawer form of humanity on display. So why is it that we seem, collectively, to care so much more, to be so more readily angry, about a chant at Glastonbury than the opinions, and decisions, of those privileged individuals who actually hold the power to shape what will happen in Gaza and Israel? The future tense there is deliberate. We all know what happened, past tense, on October 7 of 2023. We know of the innocent lives stolen, and the indelible trauma those horrors have inflicted on thousands of Israelis. We know civilians were dragged into the tunnels as hostages, where some remain all these months later. We know about the litany of other atrocities committed by Hamas, not just on that day, but for many years before it. We know it's a terrorist group whose existence hinges on an objective of genocide. We know it cynically uses Palestinian civilians as human shields, hiding in hospitals and neighbourhoods. And we recognise the cruel irony that follows, when Hamas condemns the deaths it goaded Israel into causing. So to banish any lack of clarity: a person who supports Hamas in Australia, or Britain, or America, or any other liberal nation, is insulting their own intelligence. We also know that, in this age of social media, the terrors of war are more easily witnessed and documented than ever before. Which makes the images from Gaza uniquely affecting. All these things we know. And not one of them gives Israel a carte blanche to do absolutely anything it likes in response. Not one renders all collateral damage acceptable. Not one frees Israel from the obligations of international law, or of basic morality. Not one strips all the women, children and innocent men in Gaza of their dignity and right to life. The responsibility of those with power is to consider what comes next; to build the best possible future they can. Not to seek vengeance for what came before. And this war ... what has it become, exactly? It started as a crime against Israeli civilians. Then it became a retaliatory mission, one of self-defence, whose stated aim was to root out Hamas. What is it now? Whole cities have been reduced to rubble. Some monumental number of the 2.2 million people who lived in Gaza are dead. And the survivors of this carnage live in tents, and walk kilometres to line up for food, ever fearful of gunshots from the soldiers above. Where does it stop? What is the objective? How does this end any other way than with the radicalisation of an entire new generation of Palestinians, and more decades of violence, and more despicable anti-Semitism rising across the world in a backlash to Israel's actions, and any prospect of a lasting peace being killed off for another lifetime? If you are genuinely angry, and genuinely horrified, by those words from Bob Vylan, then I ask this of you: as you read these quotes below, imagine the roles are reversed. Assess how you would react if a Palestinian said these things about the Israeli people. First is Nissim Vaturi, Deputy Speaker in Israel's Knesset and a member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's party. He described the Palestinians as 'subhumans'. And he called for all men in Gaza to be killed. 'Who is innocent in Gaza? 'Civilians' went out and slaughtered people in cold blood,' Mr Vaturi told the radio station Kol BaRama. Air quotes there implied by him, not me. 'They are outcasts, and no one in the world wants them.' He argued that Israel should 'separate the children and women and kill the adults in Gaza', and said the IDF was being 'too considerate'. 'The international community understands the residents of Gaza are not welcome anywhere.' Too considerate! 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