Expert stands by claims

A senior paediatrician who told police that the husband of cleared solicitor Sally Clark had murdered their two children said today that he stood by the allegation.

Professor David Southall made the accusation about Steve Clark after watching a Channel 4 Dispatches documentary about the case.

Asked by Richard Tyson, for the General Medical Council, sitting in Manchester, if he still believed that Stephen Clark had killed both Clark's children, he replied "yes".

Prof Southall, 55, watched the documentary on April 27, 2000, and contacted police the next day.

He told detectives that Mr Clark's description of a nosebleed suffered by his first son Christopher led him to believe that there had been a suffocation attempt.

He talked to people involved in the original case and concluded in a report he wrote on the Clark family in August 2000 that it was extremely likely, if not certain, that Mr Clark must have suffocated Christopher.

Today, he said: "I felt that the information I had on the bleeding nose incident indicated that Mr Clark had done it and therefore that the two subsequent deaths had been done by Mr Clark."

He told the GMC he still stood by his claims.

Sally Clark was convicted in 1999 of murdering her children, but cleared by the Court of Appeal in January 2003.

She was charged with the murders in July 1998 after both she and her husband had been arrested on suspicion of murder.

In November 1998, the couple's third child was born and was taken into the care of foster parents, but was later returned to his father.

Today, Prof Southall told the GMC he had been worried for the safety of the Clarks' third child and had wanted the case to be reinvestigated.

He told the GMC he was concerned that police had not checked Mr Clark's alibi on the night Christopher died in 1996.

Prof Southall faces a charge of serious professional misconduct, which he denies.