Chief executive's relatives killed
The parents-in-law of Shropshire County Council chief executive Carolyn Downs have been killed in a car crash.
Mrs Downs is married to economics professor, Jonathan Michie, director of the University of Birmingham Business School.
His parents, leading academics Professor Donald Michie and Dame Anne McLaren, were in a car which left the M11 as they travelled from Cambridge to London on Sunday.
At the start of today's county council cabinet meeting, leader Malcolm Pate expressed the authority's condolences to Mrs Downs and her family.
Professor Donald Michie was a researcher in artificial intelligence who had worked as part of the British code-breaking at Bletchley Park during the Second World War.
He went on to be director of the University of Edinburgh's Department of Machine Intelligence and Perception and was founder, director and chief scientist at the Turing Institute in Glasgow.
Dame Anne, his ex-wife, was a leading geneticist who became the first woman officer of the Royal Society
She was a fellow of King's College and Christ College, Cambridge, and a member of the Warnock Commission that advised on ethical issues relating to the use of genetics.
Mrs Downs has been county council chief executive since 2003.
She came to Shropshire in November 1999 when she became the council's first director of community and environmental services.
