UK inquiry told of Iraqi prisoner treatment

A wide-ranging public inquiry into his death and the British Army's use of so-called conditioning techniques to "soften up" prisoners for interrogation got under way today.

The inquiry heard that Mr Mousa's injuries may have been inflicted "with a greater degree of deliberation" than was previously thought.

A video of a British soldier screaming abuse at the hooded detainees was played to the hearing in London.

The film showed Corporal Donald Payne, formerly of the Queen's Lancashire Regiment, shouting and swearing at the moaning Iraqis as they were forced to maintain painful "stress positions".

Gerard Elias QC, counsel to the inquiry, said: "Even if one considers only the video that we have just looked at, it may be thought to be entirely apparent that these detainees were being subjected to stress positions and prolonged hooding.

"Of course this was not at the point of capture, not while the detainees were in transit, but when they were in an enclosed - or relatively enclosed - building at BG Main (the base where detainees were taken) with soldiers to guard them to prevent escape."

Mr Elias said the detainees claimed the abuse started almost immediately after they were arrested by British troops at the Ibn Al Haitham hotel.

He said: "Some of them allege that they and Baha Mousa were stepped on when they were made to lie on the floor of the lobby."

Some detainees claimed they were urinated on and forced to lie face down over a hole in the ground filled with excrement, he said.

One of them claimed they were kicked by troops while being transferred to their detention base, where they were imprisoned in a small building for 48 hours.

Others were taken to a toilet and had their heads flushed, it was claimed.

Mr Elias said: "The detainees were hooded with hessian sandbags, they were placed in stress positions, they were subjected to shouting. There was also evidence that they were not fed or watered properly."

Some said their hands were burned with scalding water and one claimed they were forced to lie face down "with his face over a hole in the ground".

Detailing other abuses, Mr Elias said: "One man says he was made to dance in the style of Michael Jackson."

He added: "There was shouting, moaning, even screaming coming from the TDF (temporary detention facility) from time to time during the detention, according to some witnesses.

"And the inquiry will hear scandalous accounts of an orchestrated choir of victims' reactions."

The hearing was told that Mr Mousa died at about 10pm on September 15, 2003 after a "struggle" with Cpl Payne and another soldier, Private Aaron Cooper.

Mr Elias said witnesses suggested that Cpl Payne was trying to restrain Mr Mousa by putting his knee on the detainee's back and pulling his arm back to put plastic handcuffs on him.

He went on: "It has been suggested that Baha Mousa's head was banged on the floor or wall as this was happening.

"But statements to this inquiry now suggest perhaps a greater degree of deliberation than has hitherto been described."

Different pathologists gave the cause of Mr Mousa's death as either asphyxia and multiple injuries or asphyxia alone, the inquiry heard.

Mr Elias told how soldiers from the Queen's Lancashire Regiment were working in very difficult conditions in Basra at the time.

He said the regiment had arrived in southern Iraq in mid-June with an "essential role of stabilisation and reconstruction".

He added: "There is little doubt that the QLR was faced by a very challenging operational environment in Iraq.

"As we will increasingly discover, soldiers were to cope with very difficult environmental conditions."

Conditioning methods can include hooding, handcuffing or depriving suspects of sleep, or making them stand in stress positions with their knees bent and hands outstretched.

The techniques were banned by the British government in 1972 following an investigation into interrogation in the North, the inquiry was told.

Mr Elias quoted then-prime minister Edward Heath's statement to the House of Commons in March 1972 in which he said: "I must make it plain that interrogation in depth will continue, but that these techniques will not be used."

Mr Heath told MPs at the time that any future UK government wanting to authorise conditioning would probably have to ask parliament for the powers to do so.

Mr Elias said: "Nobody, so far as the inquiry is concerned, appears to suggest that in the 30 succeeding years Parliament did authorise the use of these five techniques by Armed Forces as an aid to interrogation."

He added: "Whatever else happened to the (Iraqi) detainees during their detention, there may be thought to be considerable force in the suggestion that techniques were applied to them which had been prohibited in 1972 by what we are going to call as shorthand the Heath ruling."

Mr Elias also quoted a British military memo from May 2004 which left open the question of whether hooding was illegal.

He said: "It seems therefore that even in 2004, some nine months after Baha Mousa's death, there was uncertainty as to whether the Heath ruling applied outside of Northern Ireland.

"Indeed there is evidence which casts more than a little doubt on whether PJHQ (Permanent Joint Headquarters) was even aware of the Heath inquiry."

Cpl Payne became the first member of the British Armed Forces to admit a war crime when he pleaded guilty to inhumanely treating civilians at a court martial in September 2006.

He was dismissed from the Army and sentenced to one year in a civilian jail.

Six other soldiers also faced the court martial, but they were all cleared on all counts in March 2007.

Lieutenant General Bill Rollo, the Army's Adjutant General, said in a statement: "The Army welcomes the beginning of this public inquiry into the events surrounding the death of Mr Baha Mousa in September 2003.

"The inquiry will independently identify what went wrong, will help us to understand how and why Mr Mousa died, and ensure that every possible lesson from this incident is learnt.

"The Ministry of Defence and the Army are co-operating fully with the inquiry.

"While over 120,000 British service personnel have served in Iraq with bravery and distinction over six years of a difficult and arduous campaign, the failure of even a few to meet our own high standards is unacceptable.

"It was for that reason that a number of officers and soldiers were court martialled for offences relating to Mr Mousa's death and one non-commissioned officer was sentenced to 12 months' imprisonment and dismissed from the Army.

"We have done a great deal in the intervening years to improve our training and procedures but we firmly believe that there is more to learn."

The inquiry cost around £3.5m (€4.05m) up to the end of May, and is currently incurring expenses of about £450,000 (€520,071) per month.

Its officials have worked through a huge amount of material in preparation for the public hearings, uploading 60,000 pages of documents onto a computer database and taking some 175 witness statements.

The Iraqi detainees and the soldiers prosecuted in the court martial are expected to give evidence later in the inquiry.