It took a missing person investigation by the Metropolitan Police, the Foreign Office and Interpol to finally reveal what happened to Mr Hamilton in August 2023.
After Pegasos withheld information about their client’s demise, his shocked relatives finally received his ashes two months after his death in Switzerland. His farewell letters and his personal belongings remain unaccounted for.
The Police has called out Pegasos’s “lack of compassion and lack of transparency” as “completely unacceptable”.
Mr Hamilton’s elderly mother Judith said: “We’re all still heartbroken and still have so many questions, but I’m not sure we will ever get all the answers… Why Pegasos acted the way they did and agreed to help Alastair do this, I don’t think I will ever understand.”
His brother Toby slammed Pegasos as a “cowboy operation”.
In Switzerland, a person of sound mind may be helped to die, even if they are not terminally ill and have no medical conditions. Dignitas, the most famous “clinic” in the country, has helped kill at least 540 Britons over the last 20 years.
While Mr Hamilton had no diagnosed illness, he is said to have suffered from low moods, weight loss and tiredness, and he spoke about suicide to his family.
Ongoing assisted suicide debate
Former Conservative MP Nadine Dorries recently wrote about how the death of her husband from cancer reinforced her view that assisted suicide is wrong and should not be legalised, as reported by SPUC.
Her husband went “from desperately wanting to take a trip to Dignitas… to wishing that he hadn’t refused that chemotherapy – because it would have given him a few more precious months”, Dorries explained.
Assisted suicide legislation is currently being considered in the UK, while a supporting petition promoted by Esther Rantzen has so far gained over of 70,000 signatures.
Last year, a palliative care expert told an ongoing assisted suicide inquiry in Westminster that proposals to legalise assisted suicide in England and Wales were “bonkers… That is the state essentially bonkers…“, and that it would endanger the public.
Death is not the answer
SPUC’s Michael Robinson, Executive Director (Public Affairs and Legal Services), said: “The commercialisation of death, taking advantage of vulnerable people, in Switzerland and elsewhere has led to needless deaths, as we can see here.
“This tragic case exposes the danger of permitting a system that, far from being compassionate, kills patients to cure them, further enabling the insidious view that some lives are not worth living – or are too expensive for health services to deal with.
“As we’ve seen in Canada where a cancer patient waited weeks for treatment but was granted assisted suicide in two days, this disastrous trend has already led to thousands of deaths every year. Some Canadians have even been recommended assisted suicide for reasons of poverty and PTSD. The death toll mounts.
“While the case of Mr Hamilton might seem extreme, this same selling of suicide as an answer – and even an expectation and pressure to ‘choose’ death – is what makes assisted suicide so dangerous to the vulnerable, people who deserve long lives with their families and friends, not lonely deaths far from home at the hands of a cold stranger.”
