British army sent unqualified investigators to Iraq where troops ‘got away with murder’, veterans say

On 23rd June 2020, Michael Selby-Green reports

Editor’s Note: The Assange case is about prosecuting the publisher for exposing war crimes that have not been prosecuted. This article explains how a Government creates a system to frustrate the rule of law

The British army’s choice of unqualified junior officers to lead its police investigations unit during and after the 2003 invasion of Iraq contributed to soldiers escaping accountability for abuses, former members of the unit have told Declassified UK.

Senior army commanders pressured a junior officer to stop an internal investigation into a British war crime in Iraq, writing it off as an “unfortunate incident in war”, a former member of the Royal Military Police’s Special Investigations Branch (SIB) has told Declassified UK

Another former senior SIB officer has said that British paratroopers should have been convicted of killing another Iraqi but they escaped punishment when a trial collapsed after failings in an SIB investigation. 

Declassified UK has spoken to four former soldiers in the SIB, which deployed to the Iraq conflict in 2003 alongside conventional troops, ready to investigate serious incidents involving UK forces, including potential British war crimes. None wanted to be named.

Decisions were made not to send sufficiently qualified senior investigating officers to command the SIB during the invasion and early tours, the former SIB members said. This made it easier for the army’s senior command to influence the investigations into abuses and created a backlog of unresolved cases,they say.

“I did not feel qualified to deal with an investigation of this scale and did not have sufficient resources,” one of the unit’s leaders later said. The SIB should have sent their “A-team” to Iraq, but instead dispatched officers who were “completely unqualified” to lead serious investigations in a theatre of war, a former senior SIB officer told Declassified UK

“They sent the wrong people… And to this day I don’t know why,” the source said. “The more I think about it, the more mad it becomes.”

The former senior SIB officer said that one would “absolutely 100%” expect to see more UK military prosecutions coming out of Iraq. He added, “You look at the amount of people who were prosecuted – virtually none. You know, how many people got away with murder?”

There have been only four publicly disclosed cases of UK soldiers facing court martial over abuses in Iraq, with five soldiers convicted, a spokesperson for the Ministry of Defence (MOD) has confirmed.

The killing of Zahir Zaher 

An Iraqi man, Zahir Zaher, was killed by British soldiers on 24 March 2003, at a roadblock on the outskirts of Zubayr near Basra in southern Iraq. Zaher had approached a UK checkpoint guarded by British tanks and started throwing stones while advancing. 

Sergeant Steven Roberts of the 2nd royal tank regiment warned Zaher to stop, before shooting at him with a pistol. The Iraqi survived and continued to throw stones. Soldiers from two of the tanks fired and hit the Iraqi, but also killed Roberts. Zaher was still alive and another soldier killed him with shots from close range.

At a 2006 inquest into the death of Sgt Roberts, the Attorney General Lord Goldsmith told the House of Lords the case would be closed, saying, “There is insufficient evidence to institute criminal proceedings in this case” and that “there is no suggestion that the chain of command acted unlawfully.”

The killing of Zahir Zaher 

An Iraqi man, Zahir Zaher, was killed by British soldiers on 24 March 2003, at a roadblock on the outskirts of Zubayr near Basra in southern Iraq. Zaher had approached a UK checkpoint guarded by British tanks and started throwing stones while advancing. 

Sergeant Steven Roberts of the 2nd royal tank regiment warned Zaher to stop, before shooting at him with a pistol. The Iraqi survived and continued to throw stones. Soldiers from two of the tanks fired and hit the Iraqi, but also killed Roberts. Zaher was still alive and another soldier killed him with shots from close range.

The killing of Nadhem Abdullah 

In November 2005 a UK judge stopped a trial of seven British soldiers from 3 Para of the Parachute Regiment who were accused of murdering an Iraqi civilian during Parke-Robinson’s time as head of the SIB unit.

The British soldiers were accused of dragging 18-year-old Nadhem Abdullah and another Iraqi out of their car in the town of Al-Ferkah, southern Iraq, in May 2003, forcing them to lie down and battering them with rifle butts, helmets, fists and feet. 

Abdullah was taken to hospital with internal bleeding to the back of the head and died on the way. The other man survived. The prosecution said blood found on one of the rifle butts matched the DNA of Abdullah’s family. The soldiers pleaded not guilty in court.

‘No intention of prosecuting any soldier’

But flaws in the RMP went beyond the use of inexperienced commanders and ineffective investigations. The document written by government legal employees noted that before 1 November 2009, commanding officers were able to investigate but then dismiss incidents which occurred under their own command without the need for a report to come from the RMP and service police.

Read whole article in Daily Maverick ‘s Declassified UK