British Soldier with DetaineesIan Cobain writes for The Guardian:
On the evening of 11 April 2003, a pair of RAF CH47 Chinook helicopters swept over Iraq's western desert towards a remote rendezvous point beside Route 10, the highway that begins life on the outskirts of Baghdad before running for mile after mile towards the border with Jordan.
As they approached their destination, the crews assumed they were on an operation that would be uneventful. Two days earlier Saddam Hussein's statue had been toppled after American tanks rolled into the Iraqi capital; three weeks later George Bush would stand in front of a banner saying "mission accomplished".
The helicopter crews had been told that a number of detainees were under armed guard at the side of the highway. They were to pick them up after dark and take them to a prison camp. What followed was far from routine: before the night was out, one man had died on board one of the helicopters, allegedly beaten to death by RAF personnel.
The incident was immediately shrouded in secrecy. When The Guardian heard about it and began to ask questions, the Ministry of Defence responded with an extraordinary degree of obstruction and obfuscation, evading questions not just for days but for weeks and months. The RAF's own police examined the death in an investigation codenamed Operation Raker, but this ended with some of the most salient facts remaining deeply buried. The alleged culprits faced no charges.
Asked where the men were being taken, the MoD had initially indicated that they were en route to a prisoner of war camp, one inspected regularly by the Red Cross.
Later it became clear that this was not correct: they were being transported to an altogether more secret location. The truth about the mission raises some searching questions about the legality of some of the British forces' operations carried out in close co-operation with US allies.
One of the first hints that something untoward had happened aboard one of the RAF Chinooks came six years later when Lieutenant Colonel Nicholas Mercer was giving evidence at the public inquiry into the death of Baha Mousa, the hotel receptionist tortured to death by British troops in September that year.
Mercer, who had been the British army's most senior lawyer in Iraq, told the inquiry that by the time of Mousa's death, several other people had died in UK military custody.
Asked about these mysterious deaths, the Ministry of Defence named one of the deceased as Tanik Mahmud, and said he had "sustained a fatal injury" while travelling aboard an RAF Chinook. Perplexingly, the ministry added that the cause of his death remained unknown.
UNLAWFUL KILLING
Asked how they could be sure he had suffered a fatal injury when the cause of his death was not known, the MoD took five weeks to answer.
Eventually, officials admitted that the RAF had received a complaint – anonymously, they said – that "three RAF Regiment personnel on board the helicopter had kicked, punched or otherwise assaulted Mr Mahmud leading to unlawful killing".
This raised many other questions, which the MoD appeared sometimes reluctant to answer.
One of the few that it answered promptly – within hours – concerned the location to which the prisoners were being taken. They were going to Umm Qasr, the MoD said: this was the town on the Kuwaiti border where British and American forces had constructed a large prisoner-of-war camp, a place that came under the supervision of military lawyers and was inspected regularly by the Red Cross.
More information about the incident was to be found in a number of documents released in Australia under that country's freedom of information laws.
The deceased had been one of 64 men detained at a roadblock set up by a soldiers of the Australian SAS. Working alongside a solitary member of a US airforce unit, the 20 Australians were attempting to capture so-called "high-value targets", former high-ranking members of the deposed regime attempting to flee the country.
Seven days earlier, Saddam had appeared suddenly in the middle of a crowd of cheering supporters, an event that was filmed and broadcast on Iraqi TV, along with a speech he was said to have made in which he exhorted his countrymen to "fight them brothers, hit them day and night". The coalition forces were determined to find him.
Three of the prisoners at the side of the highway were suspected of being officials of Saddam's ruling Ba'ath party. Four were held because they were Iranians and in possession of an enormous sum of cash – more than $600,000 – and a letter offering a bounty for each American killed.
The remainder of the prisoners appear to have fallen under suspicion because they were travelling together on a coach. Some were Iraqis and others were Syrian, and all were to be interrogated about Saddam.
None of the 64 were armed, however, and none were in uniform. A number were middle-aged and at least one was severely disabled. Despite this, the men were to be detained as EPWs, enemy prisoners of war. They were to be loaded into the Chinooks in groups of eight and ferried to the prison camp.
As a result of what might be described as a legal sleight of hand, the men were never recorded as prisoners of the 20 Australians. On paper, at least, the lone American was said to have captured them. This meant that the Australian government could consider itself not to be bound by a Geneva convention clause that obliged it to demand the return of any prisoner it transferred to the US if it became apparent that US forces were not treating them in accordance with the convention.
At this point in the Guardian's inquiries, a report written by the squadron leader commanding the 2nd squadron of the RAF Regiment was leaked.
This document, prepared as part of a brief US field inquiry into the incident, showed that the Australians had bound the prisoners' thumbs together before handing them over.
The RAF Regiment gunners then placed hessian bags over the prisoners' heads as they were being led aboard the Chinooks, despite a ban on hooding imposed on the UK's armed forces more than four decades earlier.
KNELT UPON
Each prisoner was forced to lie face down on the floor of the aircraft, and those who "refused to adopt the required position" were forced to the floor and knelt upon.
One man who slipped out of his thumb restraint and flailed his arms around was said to have been "lowered" to the floor and "subdued".
By the time the helicopters had reached their destination, two of the prisoners "were found to be unresponsive", according to the squadron leader, while "there was some commotion at the front of the aircraft" because a third prisoner, a disabled man, had somehow parted company with both his prosthetic legs.
It was a windy night, the sand was being whipped up by the Chinooks' rotor blades, and visibility was down to 1.5 metres. The American troops who received the prisoners say the British appeared to be rushing, anxious to transport them all before dawn.
The two "unresponsive" men were loaded into the back of a Humvee vehicle, face down and on top of each other, while the man with no legs was placed in the front passenger seat.
All three were driven to a "holding facility", where one was declared dead. The bag had been taped so securely over his head that it needed to be cut off.
The US inquiry concluded that "appropriate" methods had been used to subdue the man who died. The RAF made no attempt to contact next of kin to inform them of his death, however. Were it not for the anonymous complaint, this would have been the end of the matter.
The complaint is understood to have been made by a member of the Chinook's crew, unhappy at what he saw happening in the helicopter's cabin as they were flying to the camp. After receiving the complaint, the RAF police moved slowly.
According to the MoD, they waited more than a year after the death before asking an RAF pathologist whether the body should be exhumed and examined. Asked to explain the delay, the MoD said the investigators "did not know Mr Mahmud's place of burial".
Once the location was disclosed by the US military, officials explained, "discussions took place on the feasibility of accessing Mr Mahmud's remains, taking into account serious security concerns and obtaining permission from the local imam". At this point, according to the MoD, the RAF pathologist "indicated that given the climate and the degree of decomposition since the death, it would be extremely difficult to establish cause of death". As a result, no postmortem examination was ever carried out.
This advice surprises one eminent civilian pathologist, who says that only exhumation could reveal the state of decomposition.
Derrick Pounder, professor of forensic medicine at the University of Dundee, who has experience of exhumations and postmortem examinations in the Middle East – including cases of deaths in custody – said: "That advice would be contrary to the advice that any UK forensic scientist would offer to any police in the UK who were investigating an allegation of assault leading to death."
He says an examination of the hard tissue may have revealed evidence of an assault before the prisoner died: ribs, for example, sometimes fracture in a distinctive manner when kicked. Asked whether a copy of the pathologist's advice would be made available, the MoD said no copy could be found in its files. After this advice was received the case was passed to RAF's prosecutors, who advised that there was insufficient evidence to bring any charges. They also concluded that any further investigation was pointless.
Asked why the men had been taken as EPWs, when none were armed and all were wearing civilian clothes, the MoD appeared to be stumped.
"UK forces did not detain these individuals, they transported them," the ministry said. "This is not a question we can answer. This question should be directed to the detaining country."
Eventually, The Guardian obtained a copy of the passport that had been in the dead man's pocket, and the death certificate that had been issued by the US military authorities. The passport showed the dead man was a Baghdad odd-job man aged 36. It also showed that his name was not Tanik Mahmud, but Tariq Sabri al-Fahdawi. The RAF police investigation appeared to have been so superficial that it had failed to establish the dead man's identity.