A senior MP yesterday challenged an official inquiry's finding that Government scientist David Kelly committed suicide.

Weapons inspector Dr Kelly was the man at the heart of the furore over the Government's dossier on Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction, and his death in 2003 led to the Hutton Inquiry.

Liberal Democrat back-bencher Norman Baker published his own dossier of evidence which he believes casts considerable doubt on the inquiry's key conclusion that Kelly killed himself.

"Today, I challenge that conclusion," wrote Mr Baker in the Mail on Sunday. "I do so on the basis that the medical evidence available simply cannot sustain it and that Dr Kelly's own behaviour and character argues against it."

Dr Kelly was the source for the notorious BBC report suggesting that intelligence officials were unhappy with the claim in the Government's dossier ahead of the Iraq War that Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction could be fired within 45 minutes.

After his name became public, he was subjected to a televised grilling by a parliamentary committee, followed by further questioning behind closed doors by a second committee. Within days, he went missing from his Oxford-shire home and his body was found in nearby woodland. Mr Baker high-lighted a series of concerns over the claim that Kelly committed suicide.

Among them were:

* Dr Kelly is supposed to have cut his ulnar artery in his wrist, an inaccessible and minor artery which would be more difficult and painful to sever than the radial artery, which is m ore usually cut in suicides.

In 2003, he was the only person in the UK recorded to have committed suicide in this way. The knife he is supposed to have used was a blunt gardening tool. n Paramedics who attended the scene said he had lost little blood and was "incredibly unlikely" to have died from the wound they saw.