This time anyway I'm not trying to stir things up, but to damp them down.

I've seen how this kind of thing can get out of hand, and get a bit nervous at times. When the target of speculation and so forth is some government agency or whatever, I tend to think they can take it, it comes with the job and with the rewards of the job. Also they are in the business of hiding the truth if it's embarassing to them, and sometimes wild speculation can be a way of opening things up.

But this one is a bit different. It's about two people in whose life something indescribably awful has happened, and the right thing is to stand back and avoid saying anything out of hand.

More important, we should maybe be looking around the people we know, and imagining whether there might be someone or some family desperately needing support or intervention of some kind, and is there anything we might be doing. (The publicity around this kind of thing can be a factor in triggering it off elsewhere, as has been repeatedly demonstrated.)

And I am quite sure that there are in fact going to be people round the Mudcat who are doing exactly that right now.