Inquest Opens into Soham Murderer Huntleys Prison Death

An inquest into the death of Ian Huntley, the convicted murderer of two young girls in Soham, Cambridgeshire, opened on Tuesday in Crook, County Durham, revealing that he died from blunt force trauma to the head following a prison assault. Huntley, aged 52, passed away at the Royal Victoria Infirmary in Newcastle on March 7 after being attacked on February 26 in a workshop at HMP Frankland, a maximum-security prison in Durham.

The inquest, presided over by senior coroner Jeremy Chipperfield of the County Durham and Darlington Coroner service, heard that Huntley was struck multiple times with a metal bar by another inmate. A postmortem examination conducted on March 9 by Dr. Jennifer Bolton at the hospital's mortuary provisionally determined the cause of death as a blunt head injury. Coroner's officer Bradley King stated during the hearing, "I understand the circumstances to be that Mr. Huntley was struck over the head multiple times by another prisoner with an object described as a metal bar." The assault resulted in severe injuries, including a significant head wound and a broken jaw, leaving Huntley blinded and in an induced coma. Emergency services responded with two...