BBC host admits to killing partner

He said the person had been a partner from long ago, stricken with AIDS. “In a hospital one hot afternoon, the doctor said, ‘There’s nothing we can do,’ and he was in terrible, terrible pain,” Mr Gosling, 70, said on Monday in the BBC program “Inside Out.” “I said to the doctor, ‘Leave me just for a bit,’ and he went away. I picked up the pillow and smothered him until he was dead.”

The confession put  Gosling, a well-known figure who has made dozens of documentaries for radio and television, in the center of a furious long-running debate about euthanasia in Britain. But if he was defying the authorities to do something about it, they called his bluff. On Wednesday, Gosling was arrested on suspicion of murder and taken to a Nottinghamshire police station for questioning. He has not yet been formally charged.

In interviews after the initial broadcast, Gosling refused to name the man he said he had killed or to reveal where the killing took place. He has also said that he would not give the name to the police.

Assisted suicide is illegal in England and Wales and carries a sentence of up to 14 years in prison. But though the law seems perfectly clear, it is full of ambiguity. Recent cases have tested when and in what way the state is prepared to intervene. In the last decade, dozens of terminally ill Britons have travelled to Switzerland, where assisted suicide is legal, and killed themselves with the help of friends or family members. No one has yet been charged in connection with the deaths.

But in two high-profile cases this year, two mothers were prosecuted in connection with the deaths of gravely ill children in Britain. In one case, Frances Inglis, 57, was sentenced to life in prison after injecting her severely brain-damaged 22-year-old son, Thomas, with heroin, as he lay in a nursing home.

In the second case, Bridget Kathleen Gilderdale, 55, was acquitted of attempted murder after helping her 31-year-old daughter, Lynn, kill herself with a lethal cocktail of drugs. Gosling’s confession raised a flurry of condemnation from groups opposing assisted suicide. In several interviews the next day, on radio and television, Gosling said he had no regrets. “I did the right thing,” he told the BBC. “If there’s a heaven and he’s looking down, he’d be proud of me.”