Hoon to respond to Iraq torture allegations from Christians
-10/5/04
Geoff Hoon will today face pressure to explain exactly when ministers were told of the Iraqi abuse allegations, after the Red Cross and Amnesty International declared yesterday that they passed on their concerns more than a year ago.
The declarations came as Christian Peacemaker Teams also told of how they presented evidence of prisoner abuse and torture to the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in Iraq at the beginning of January.
In an interview for Radio 4's Sunday Programme Christian Peacemakers spoke about a dossier of 72 case studies that they had collected detailing torture and abuse of Iraqi civilians who were later released.
On Tuesday last week, in a letter in the Guardian newspaper, a partner of Christian Peacemaker Teams in the UK, Ekklesia, raised questions about how much the authorities already knew about abuse and torture. The think tank also suggested that abuse was systematic.
In his first Commons appearance since the row erupted over the alleged abuse of Iraqi prisoners, the defence secretary is likely to be asked whether a fellow minister lied last week over the claims.
Adam Ingram, the armed forces minister, told MPs last Tuesday that he had received no "adverse" reports from any outside body on the treatment of Iraqi prisoners under the command of British troops.
His explanation appeared to be undermined at the weekend when Downing Street confirmed that a Red Cross report, leaked last week to the Wall Street Journal, was passed to the "relevant" British authorities in February.
As Mr Hoon prepared for today's statement, the Red Cross and Amnesty International intensified the pressure on ministers by insisting that they had raised the allegations well before then.
Roland Huguenin-Benjamin, a Red Cross spokesman, told Sky News: "The concern we have been expressing for a year now deals with a general pattern of mistreatment of detainees ... We were warning of the fact that the treatment given to prisoners and in particular the way they were prepared for interrogation is not acceptable from the point of view of the Geneva convention."
His remarks were echoed by Amnesty, which said it first raised its concerns last May in a memo to the Ministry of Defence. This led to a meeting with MoD and Foreign Office officials in June over claims that Iraqi prisoners had been killed and tortured in UK custody. The group said it received a letter from the government two weeks later. In October it wrote to Mr Hoon, the same month as the government wrote back to promise it would look into the allegations.
An Amnesty spokesman said: "We have had a series of meetings and correspondence with the government over this for a year now. Now it is saying it only became aware of the allegations in February. The UK government has known about allegations of torture and one death by British troops since last May."
Mr Hoon is expected to say that action was taken after abuses were brought to the attention of the British authorities by the Red Cross.
Charles Kennedy, the Liberal Democrat leader and Robin Cook have both called on the government to publish the Red Cross report.
"The government could immediately ease public concerns by publishing the details of the Red Cross report," Charles Kennedy told the BBC. "It is essential that this is dealt with quickly and openly."
Army prosecutors are expected soon to charge British soldiers with sexual assault and manslaughter relating to incidents in southern Iraq last year. A decision concerning soldiers from the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers and the Queen's Lancashire Regiment is "not far off", defence sources said yesterday.
The Ministry of Defence did not deny reports that military police investigators are to recommend the prosecution of soldiers in the fusiliers for assault and breaches of the Geneva convention.
The military police are also understood to have recommended the prosecution of a soldier from the Lancashire regiment for manslaughter of an Iraqi in Basra last September. Baha Mousa, 26, died and a number of other Iraqis were allegedly assaulted when soldiers raided a hotel. His case is one of more than 10 to be cited in the high court tomorrow when lawyers will argue that the MoD must accept legal liability for the incidents.
A witness to the raid on the hotel, Kifah Taha al-Mutari, alleges in a court statement that British soldiers laughed as he and others were "beaten, hooded, and our hands were wired". The incident is one of those mentioned in the Red Cross report sent to the British government in February.
Six Iraqis have died in British custody over the past year, according to the Ministry of Defence.
The MoD said three military personnel - believed to be intelligence officers - were stationed at Abu Ghraib, the Baghdad prison at the centre of the US abuse scandal.
The British officers were at the prison between January and April, a time when the Red Cross was reporting serious abuses. The MoD said British interrogators were gathering information consistent with the Geneva convention.
Printer-friendly version