Mother Wins MoD Apology Over Iraq Death Of Soldier Son

The Defence Secretary, Sir Michael Fallon, has apologised in a letter to the mother of a soldier killed in a lightly armoured Snatch Land Rover in Iraq.

Sue Smith's son, Pte Phillip Hewett, was killed in a roadside bomb attack in 2005.

He was the ninth of 37 service personnel to be killed in a Land Rover in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The vehicles gained such a dangerous reputation that they came to be known as "mobile coffins".

Twelve years later, following a Supreme Court legal battle, his mother has finally received an apology for the death of her son, for which she believed the danger posed by the vehicle to be partially responsible. 

Speaking to the BBC, she said: “He didn’t die for nothing”.

At the time of Hewett's death in 2005, the MoD released a statement saying:

“Private Hewett, aged 21, from Tamworth, was Second Lieutenant Shearer’s driver - a respected position of enormous responsibility only given to the best of senior soldiers.

“He was skilled as a driver of both Land-Rovers and Warrior Armoured Fighting Vehicles and had been with the platoon since arriving in the 1st Battalion three years ago.

“Private Hewett had marked himself as having a sound future in the army and had been selected to attend a promotional course in the winter. Exceptionally fit, he was also short-listed to become a Physical Training Instructor.”