British police are reportedly studying whether the suicides of two students at Edinburgh University are linked to literature published by Australia’s leading euthanasia activist, Dr Philip Nitschke. Robert Miller, 20, and James Robertson, 19, were found slumped in chairs in a hotel in the Scottish town of Ayr.

Dr Nitschke is the inventor of the “deliverance machine”, a syringe linked to a laptop which administers a lethal injection after the operator answers Yes to a series of questions on the screen. His device was used legally to kill four Australians when euthanasia was briefly legal in the Northern Territory in the 1990s.

Last year Dr Nitschke toured Britain giving suicide workshops to the elderly. The British media is now fretting that his advice is being taken by the young, the vulnerable, and the mentally ill.

So far, Dr Nitschke has not commented on the incident. He is currently giving a number of workshops in Australia to senior citizens on how to bypass censorship of suicide websites. People attending his most recent one in Darwins, he told the Northern Territory News, are " not sick people but they want to know if they deteriorate that they've got at their fingertips some strategy... for a peaceful death." ~ London Times, June 14