"UK company supplied execution drugs to Arizona," is the AP report, via Bloomberg.
A British company supplied the three drugs used to execute death-row inmates to a prison in Arizona, anti-death penalty advocates said Thursday.
Rights group Reprieve said Dream Pharma Ltd., a company run from a London driving school office, shipped sodium thiopental, potassium chloride and pancuronium bromide in September. Reprieve released a copy of the firm's invoice to the Arizona State Prison Complex for 4,253 pounds ($6,584) worth of the three drugs.
Two months later and after pressure from campaigners, the British government banned the export of sodium thiopental for executions. There are no similar restrictions on the other two drugs.
Britain has no death penalty and the government encourages other countries not to carry out executions.
Dream Pharma's director, Matt Alavi, declined to comment Thursday.
The BBC has, "Lethal injection drug sold from UK driving school," by Andrew Hosken.
It would be hard to imagine a more humdrum and banal place than 176 Horn Lane in Acton, west London.
Sandwiched between two blocks of flats, the modest office is home to both Elgone Driving Academy and a tiny, unconnected, pharmaceutical company that supplies the drugs used in lethal injections.
An invoice dated 28 September 2010 and obtained under Freedom of Information legislation shows that the company Dream Pharma Ltd supplied the state of Arizona with the three drugs needed for the execution of convicted murder Jeffrey Landrigan.
Documents at Companies House show that the main registered shareholder is Mehdi Alavi, 50, who describes himself as a wholesaler.
Mr Alavi declined to give an interview, claiming he had "no idea" why Carson McWilliams, the warden of the Arizona State Prison Complex, had ordered the three drugs: the anaesthetics sodium thiopental and pancuronium bromide, and potassium chloride, which is used in a diluted form to treat people with potassium deficiency.
But Clive Stafford Smith, the Director of Reprieve UK which supports prisoners on Death Row in the US, dismissed Mr Alavi's claim of ignorance over the intended use of the drugs and said that the combination of the three substances could have only one purpose.
"The invoice from Dream Pharma has enough Thiopental injection to execute ten people in Arizona, so certainly there's ten people dying," he says.
"Unfortunately we can say, without fear of contradiction, that one person is already dead from this and that's Jeffrey Landrigan who was executed on 26 October. He died with British drugs apparently.
"The whole issue here is bizarre. How can we have a driving instructor with a pharmaceutical company in the back cupboard basically selling drugs to an American corrections institution to kill people? And it's bizarre that the law allows it."
The UK Press Association post is, "London firm supplied drugs used for US lethal injections," via the Guardian.
Reprieve's director, Clive Stafford Smith, said: "Dream Pharma asserts that selling these drugs was no different from selling a hammer in a hardware shop.
"The analogy is apposite only if we include one fact – the customer told the salesman that he planned to bludgeon someone to death with it outside the store.
"Dream Pharma's tentative assertion to the media that they did not know the drugs were to be used for executions is simply false.
"The three drugs they sold to the Arizona State prison are the three drugs used for lethal injection, and the emails back and forth make it clear that they knew precisely what they were doing.
"Revealed: How this unlikely driving school in Acton sells lethal injection drugs for executions to jails in the U.S.," is the title of the Daily Mail report.
Lethal injections drugs used to carry out executions in the U.S. have been supplied by a British businessman, it emerged today.
Mehdi Alavi runs his pharmaceutical company Dream Pharma from the Elgone Driving Academy in Acton, London.
In September he sold the state of Arizona £4,253 of drugs to be used to carry out lethal injections, according to the BBC.
The chemicals were shipped by courier company Fedex and used to execute Jeffrey Landrigan, a 50-year-old murderer, in October.
Clive Stafford Smith, from prisoners' rights group Reprieve, told Radio 4's Today show that the situation was extraordinary.
'How can you have a driving instructor run a pharmaceutical company in a broom cupboard selling drugs to America to kill people?' he said.
Earlier coverage begins with the preceding post; more from Arizona, at the link.
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