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Ray Gosling, an award-winning documentary maker and television presenter for the BBC, has been arrested for murder after confessing on the air that he smothered to death a lover who was dying of AIDS. Gosling, 70, made the startling confession during the broadcast of the show Inside Out on Monday, February 15. As the segment he was narrating was ending, the veteran broadcaster said, "Maybe this is the time to share a secret that I have kept for quite a long time." As he wandered through a cemetery in Britain's East Midlands, a clearly grief-stricken Gosling recounted with minimal detail how one afternoon in the early days of AIDS he visited his dying lover in the hospital and smothered him with a pillow to relieve his suffering. The confession was unscripted (video after the jump).

Following the admission, Gosling, a pioneer of gay rights, stated that he would not cooperate with authorities in investigating his claim. He has refused to name the deceased or exactly when and where the incident took place. The only details he has revealed after Monday's broadcast are that he and the man had made a pact to end each other's suffering should the need arise and that it happened during the "very, very early days of AIDS," which suggests the 1980s. In responses to press inquiries as to why he would refuse to cooperate with an investigation, Gosling said, "They [the police] will not know when, where, not a thing. What’s the point of telling them? It was a private pact between us."

Gosling was arrested Wednesday morning by Nottinghamshire police and, according to his attorney, is being detained. If convicted of assisting with the suicide of his lover, he faces up to 14 years in prison. When asked why he chose to confess after all these years, Gosling said, “[The program] was a little local thing I have been doing, speaking to people about death. I thought, ‘You bastard; all these people have opened up their hearts to you and you can’t own up’. So I did.”

Following the arrest, a BBC spokesperson responded to queries about the appropriateness of airing the confession with a prepared statement: “We believe we have handled the report sensitively and appropriately. We kept him fully informed about our representation of his story in the report and he understood that a revelation of this nature could have a number of consequences. The BBC is under no legal obligation to refer the matter to the police in these circumstances and since transmission we have been approached by the police and are co-operating fully.”