Telegraph, Sunday 18 Oct 09
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British soldier attached to special forces faces war crimes probe
A British soldier serving with the special forces is facing war crime charges after threatening to shoot dead a Taliban prisoner during interrogation unless he co-operated.
Sean Rayment, Defence correspondent
Published: 9:30PM BST 17 Oct 2009
The alleged offence took place in the Helmand province of Afghanistan in August, during a two-month period of high intensity combat which left 37 soldiers dead and more than 100 injured.
Officers from the Royal Military Police's special investigation branch are now attempting to discover whether the alleged prisoner abuse was an isolated incident or part of a wider covert policy of using mental torture techniques to extract information from Taliban detainees.
A file on the offence is now with the Army Prosecuting Authority, the military equivalent of the Crown Prosecution Service, and is part of a wide ranging Royal Military Police (RMP) investigation.
If charged, the soldier, who was serving with the special forces support group (SFSG), will be tried by court martial. If found guilty of either war crimes or assault with a weapon, he could expect to receive a custodial sentence.........
............The latest incident took place in a forward operating base in Helmand after members of the special forces captured several suspected Taliban gunmen believed to have been responsible for carrying out improvised explosive device attacks against British troops.
The suspect, described as a "high value target", was being interrogated by a member of the special forces unit specially trained in "tactical questioning", with a British military interpreter and an Afghan interpreter present.
It is understood that at one stage during the interview, when the suspect was refusing to answer questions, the British interpreter drew his pistol, cocked it and pushed the prisoner's head down on to the table. He then pressed the gun into the back of the suspect's head and said in Pashto – "answer the questions or you're dead...........
..........A source close to the inquiry said: "The police will try and establish whether there are any mitigating circumstances which would warrant such action – but it seems unlikely that there are. We are now in the arena of war crimes or assault with a deadly weapon – either way it is very damaging. We thought that after Baha Mousa this sort of thing was history."
War crimes are defined as "violations of the laws of war" and these include the ill-treatment of prisoners of war, which includes death threats during interrogation and mental torture."