Tri-Service

Government Defends Handling Of Axed Iraq War Veterans Inquiry

The Government has defended its handling of the discredited £60 million probe into allegations made against British troops in Iraq, which is now being shut down.

Veterans Minister Mark Lancaster said the Iraq Historic Allegations Team (Ihat) inquiry, which will be closed in months, was abused by lawyers, but the Ministry of Defence (MoD) acted correctly.

He told BBC Radio Four's Today programme:

"It was set up for entirely the right reasons. Without having Ihat, potentially our troops could have been subjected to inquiries by the International Criminal Court ... But it was a process that was completely abused by lawyers."

He was asked about a damning Commons Defence Committee report that said the MoD had been complicit in the creation of the legal industry that sprang up around Ihat.

Mr Lancaster said: "It is a serious allegation. I'm not sure that there is any evidence that the MoD have been complicit in that."

Mr Lancaster, who would not be drawn on possible compensation for veterans impacted by Ihat, said that a small number of serious cases involving personnel in Afghanistan and Iraq would still be investigated by military authorities.

Liberal Democrat ex-armed forces minister Sir Nicholas Harvey said the then Labour government was right to create Ihat in 2010.

"When you have got serious allegations, allegations of murder, of rape and torture, the reputation of the British armed forces is on the line, and it really would not have been acceptable to have ignored these allegations and swept them under the carpet.

"What went wrong was this extraordinary volume of, in some cases, quite spurious complaints which brought the whole thing down," he told the BBC.

The scathing report by the defence committee said the probe had subjected serving and retired troops to "deeply disturbing" treatment and had "directly harmed" UK defences.

MPs set out a litany of failures about the way the MoD had handled the probe.

They criticised it for "serious" failings after it handed over more than £110,829 to Abu Jamal, an Iraqi middleman, while he was employed by Public Interest Lawyers (PIL), the defunct firm behind many of the claims.

Phil Shiner, who ran PIL, has been struck off after being found to have acted dishonestly in bringing murder and torture claims against Iraq war veterans.