Canadian chef who sold poison to suicidal youngsters linked to 88 deaths in UK

Canadian chef Kenneth Law, who had been accused of selling a lethal poison to youngsters across the world, has now been linked to 88 deaths in the United Kingdom (UK), according to media reports on Thursday (August 25). Law was arrested in May after an investigation by The Times found that he had been selling the poison online for two years.

As per The Times report, an Interpol list containing the details of 232 of his British customers was passed to the National Crime Agency (NCA) from Canadian authorities. Subsequent enquiries found that 88 people died. The NCA said that after receiving intelligence in April that people in the UK were buying products to assist with suicide from Canadian websites, it immediately liaised with the police to conduct welfare checks on all the named recipients in the UK, The Guardian reported.

The report said that if Law were charged in relation to the British victims, he would have to be extradited to the UK, where assisting suicide carries a maximum prison sentence of 14 years.

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The NCA also said that at this early stage, there were no “confirmed links” between the items bought from the websites and the cause of death in any of the 88 cases in the UK.

Apart from working as a chef, Law is a former aerospace engineer and had spent six months in Coventry working on the Boeing 7E7 programme team for Dunlop Standard Aerospace.

Speaking to The Times in late April, he said that he came up with the business (of selling poison) after seeing his mother suffer greatly following a stroke. Law said that his father is religious and did not believe very much in euthanasia.

“She was bedridden, couldn’t speak and they had to feed her through a tube to her stomach for over seven years. And that was very painful. Not only for her family but also very painful for me to witness," Law said.

“This is why I created some avenue of escape, so that people if they are in such a circumstance, can undertake it either by themselves or by somebody else,” he added.

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