7

CAPTAIN MOUTARDE WAS not the only person from Battle Group Main to call Captain Gale Nugent of the SIB that night. Sergeant Charles Colley also phoned her on his mobile at about 11.00 pm. Colley, like Nugent, was a member of the RMP although he wasn’t a part of the Special Investigation Branch. He commanded five RMP officers and together they advised 1QLR on policing matters. Their main job was to train Iraqi personnel. They were embedded at Battle Group Main where Mousa had died.

This kind of arrangement had become a feature of the RMP’s operations within the British Army. And it meant they held an ambiguous position amongst the other soldiers. Historically they were deployed to control troop movement, directing traffic, ‘getting the army to where it needed to go’. They would often accompany the troops on missions, would even fight at their sides if necessary. In Iraq, small numbers were installed with combat units, like 1QLR, to be on hand during any action, to control the public, to intervene where a civilian might have committed a crime. Their exposure to danger was the same as for the other troops, a fact that was made quite apparent in June and August 2003 when men from these RMP detachments were the direct victims of insurgency attacks. Six were brutally murdered in a horrific assault on Basra police station. Trapped by a mob, they were slaughtered in one of the largest single casualty events for the British forces of the whole occupation. The tragedy provoked intense military and media examination. Shockingly, within a couple of months three more RMP officers were killed on 23 August 2003 in Basra, a few weeks before the detention and death of Baha Mousa. Indeed, it would be these losses, quickly communicated amongst all British troops with grapevine rapidity, which in retrospect would assume a critical factor in trying to unpick the reasons for the Mousa killing.

Despite the sacrifice and shared perils, RMP personnel were also supposed to watch over the behaviour of their comrades. Every officer, wherever he or very often she was stationed, was also part of the disciplinary structure. The military police had powers of arrest of any soldier suspected of committing a crime. Although the Special Investigation Branch would undertake the examination of serious criminal allegations, operating independently from fighting units, every RMP officer was under a duty to respond to suspected crimes as a police officer. That set those stationed with battalions apart from those they slept next to, ate and suffered fear and injury with. Embedded but apart; an unsettling combination.

Sergeant Colley happened to be wandering about Battle Group Main late that night of 15 September. He was stopped by Captain Moutarde. It isn’t clear exactly at what time this took place but it must have been soon after Moutarde had seen Mousa’s dead body, so sometime later than 10.05 pm when the death had been officially logged. Colley claimed he was walking outside the doors of the battalion HQ building when the adjutant had called out to him. He was told a prisoner had died and, being the senior member of the RMP at Battle Group Main, was asked to help out. Colley would claim later that Moutarde had said that the body was already being prepared for shipment to Shaibah field hospital. Colley said this wasn’t the correct procedure. Embracing his role as policeman, he said the body should be left alone, preserved for further investigation. But Moutarde said the SIB had told him to put the corpse in a body bag and send it on to the mortuary. Sergeant Colley wasn’t happy and he said so.

Captain Moutarde wasn’t about to argue. A death in custody was a police matter and even if it had been an accident or the result of natural causes, the adjutant wasn’t the proper person to oversee any inquiry. Colley, being the senior RMP officer present, at least had relevant police training.

Whether Colley then acted in accordance with an order from the adjutant, or simply took it upon himself to intervene, isn’t clear. But he immediately summoned one of his colleagues, Corporal Smith, and asked her to assist him. Careful then to collect and put on his red beret, that symbol of internal discipline which soldiers loathe, Colley went to the medical centre, the RAP, and spoke to Dr Keilloh. The body of Mousa was still lying on a cot-like bed, a medical trestle, covered up to his neck with a sheet. There was a tube poking out of his mouth, Colley noticed. He asked Dr Keilloh why it had been left there and he was informed that any pathologist carrying out a post-mortem would want to know what aid had been administered. The doctor claimed he was obliged to leave everything as it was at the point when they gave up resuscitation and declared the patient dead. It was a suspected heart attack, the doctor said, and then gave Colley a brief account of what had happened.

Dr Keilloh said he’d been summoned to the detention block, what they called the Theatre Detention Facility (TDF), where Iraqi prisoners were held in Battle Group Main, at about 9.40 pm. He’d found the man, who he now knew was called Baha Mousa, lying on the floor. He wasn’t breathing. The doctor had then had Mousa stretchered to the aid post so that they could use the equipment there. But at about 10.05 pm the doctor and his small team of medics had given up their resuscitation attempts and declared the man dead. That was when Captain Moutarde had been informed.

Even if Sergeant Colley didn’t think there was anything particularly suspicious in this account, he still decided to secure the medical centre as a crime scene. This was odd. One doesn’t normally preserve a medical bay where a man has been treated, not unless there was reason to imagine something untoward in that treatment. Nonetheless, he took the names of all the medics at the scene (there were six including Dr Keilloh) and then asked Corporal Smith not to let anyone into the small cubicle where the body lay, nor disturb the corpse. She was told to stand at the entrance, preventing anyone gaining access. Dr Keilloh protested and told Colley that he’d already been asked to prepare the body for transportation to the morgue. But Colley wasn’t having that. He left Corporal Smith to ensure nothing was touched whilst he went to the detention facility where he knew Mousa had been held prior to his supposed cardiac arrest.

It was only a short walk from the aid post to the detention facility, no more than a hundred metres. The TDF was a small building, the size of a double garage, with three rooms inside. The middle room was a disused latrine. It was all very crudely constructed: flat-roofed, rough-brick walls, small windows smeared with green vehicle paint, open doorways, a couple of Portaloos against the outside front wall, a simple guardroom with little inside except dirt and dust and exposed wiring. It was right up against the boundary wall of the compound and was set apart from the main accommodation and headquarters blocks, but not by much. Iraqis captured during operations were housed here temporarily, usually for no more than fourteen hours. That was supposed to be the rule.

When he got to the TDF, Sergeant Colley met a large number of men milling about the doorways. He spotted the man in charge of the facility, Corporal Donald Payne, standing outside, waiting. He took his name and details and then those of fourteen other soldiers who were there guarding the detainees; Douglas, Rodgers, Redfearn, Reader, Cooper, Aspinall, Graham, Stirland, Allibone, Appleby, MacKenzie, Hunt, Kenny and Bentham, all of whom would assume important roles in the days, weeks, months and years ahead. Sergeant Colley wrote down the information in his pocketbook as any policeman would do. These men could be witnesses. No particular urgency accompanied these actions. An investigation would have to be conducted as with any death in custody but that was all it was, a death not a killing. And it wasn’t for Colley to undertake the inquiry. The SIB had that responsibility. Although Colley would say later that if he’d suspected a crime had taken place he would have begun those investigations, he didn’t think this was the case at the time. As far as he was concerned there had been no crime and therefore no crime scene to preserve, a conclusion that in retrospect sat strangely with his initial determination to secure the medical facility.

In the middle of taking down the names of the guards in his notebook Sergeant Colley rang Captain Nugent at RMP headquarters. The call was recorded by Colley as having been made at 11.00 pm and appears amidst the written details of all the soldiers he encountered at the facility. The entry sits between the roughly scrawled names of Private Stirland and Private Allibone. Why he should have made the call at that point is a mystery. Captain Nugent, of course, already knew about the death, having been phoned earlier by Captain Moutarde. But Sergeant Colley telephoned and reported that he’d secured the medical centre and had stopped the body from being removed. Nugent told him not to worry about all that. It wasn’t necessary to keep the body in situ. He was ordered to let the corpse be put in a body bag, tagged and transferred to Shaibah mortuary as Dr Keilloh had already been instructed. According to Colley, Nugent said the SIB would deal with everything from then on. Someone would be over in the morning to carry out the formal investigation, he was informed.

This appeared to satisfy Sergeant Colley, perhaps even relieve him of further responsibility. He finished listing the names of the guards in his pocketbook and then at some point went inside the TDF. Whether this was after he had taken Payne’s and the others’ details and after he had called Nugent or during the call to Nugent isn’t clear. But at some stage he did go inside, saw the detainees, and spoke to them. He saw nothing to concern him either as a police officer or as a simple observer. He took down the names of the Iraqi prisoners inside. He wrote their details in his notebook, but at no stage did he see anything that would suggest to him any criminal activity, any mistreatment, anything ‘amiss’. If he had, he would claim later, then he would have initiated an investigation there and then. But he hadn’t. No evidence was collected about the death or how it might have occurred. The site wasn’t sealed off for examination. Unlike the aid post, he did nothing to preserve the location. He didn’t even try. All he recorded was that the scene was cleared by 11.10 pm. Given that the detainees stayed in the TDF for the remainder of the night until 8.30 the next morning, under guard, this can only have meant that he had dispersed some of the soldiers milling about outside the building. He did nothing else of consequence. Then he went to bed.