9

THERE MUST HAVE been something of a hiatus at the detention facility after Baha Mousa’s death and the visit of Sergeant Colley, the RMP officer at the base. All would have become quiet for a while. The uproar of the collapse and the failed resuscitation diminished and the hot night enveloped the detainees in their little prison. But they weren’t left alone completely.

Captain Gareth Seeds was out on patrol with Lt Col Jorge Mendonça that evening of the 15th. He’d been asked to accompany his CO because he’d been sitting around the stifling operations room at Battle Group Main for far too long. Mendonça thought he could do with a change of scenery; he thought he needed to get out from those four walls that had confined him for so long. Often Seeds would spend twenty-four hours at a time closeted in ‘ops’ coordinating the battalion’s missions, their ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ knocks. It would do him good to escape for a while, the CO thought.

Seeds was a career soldier. No fast-track university-funded course followed by Sandhurst for him. He’d joined up as soon as he left school, when he was sixteen, an apprentice tradesman to begin with, and then worked his way up gradually to the rank of captain by the time he was sent to Iraq. Now, aged thirty, he was the battalion’s operations officer, the ‘ops’, for 1QLR. During ‘live’ operations, his duties kept him largely inside, on the radio, talking to the men on the ground, liaising with Brigade, reacting to events, recording reports, sweating in the airless ops room. His main role was to coordinate the planning of these actions. Working with a couple of signallers and a watch-keeper, he would oversee control of the ‘battle space’, making sure the men had the equipment they needed and support from other units if necessary.

On the night of Mousa’s death he’d been close by the commanding officer, out on patrol. They had pulled over a black Mercedes. It had looked suspicious; black tinted windows, out of place. Two men had been hauled out. There had been an AK-47 and a pistol inside. Not that carrying weapons was a crime on the streets of Basra. It wasn’t unusual. Guns were everywhere. People needed to protect themselves. That was understood. But the patrol had to check all the same.

As the driver and passenger were being questioned, Seeds had overheard the CO receiving a radioed report that one of the detainees back at base had died. Captain Seaman, he believed, the officer who had taken over Seeds’ role in ops for the night, had been the one who had called. Seeds had heard Lt Col Mendonça order the matter to be reported at once to the RMP and Brigade HQ. They would need to know.

The patrol had finished dealing with the Mercedes driver and passenger. Mendonça’s official commander’s diary records that they had escorted these men to the local Iraqi police station ‘for processing’, although Mendonça would say later that they had taken the ‘sheikh’ found in the car home. Whatever the truth of this, the patrol had been cut short soon after and the unit returned to Battle Group Main.

When the company arrived back at base, Captain Seeds went to see Captain Seaman. As the position of ops had been handed over only temporarily, Seeds needed to take back the reins. He had to receive a debrief. Of course, there was only one topic worth mentioning. Seeds was told that Brigade and the SIB had been informed about the death in custody. The detainees were still over in the detention building. That was it, as though once the matter had been communicated to the RMP there was nothing else to do or say.

Seeds decided to go to bed. But before he did, he would say later, he went to use one of the Portaloos that stood up against the front wall of the detention facility. They were the closest toilets to the accommodation block, which was the building directly opposite. He thought he might also check that all was now quiet there. It wasn’t his job but still … maybe something had worried him, given him some cause for concern, he couldn’t or wouldn’t say.

But as he approached the detention block something felt wrong to him. There were no guards standing outside. That might well have been the result of Sergeant Colley clearing the scene a little while before, but Seeds wouldn’t have known about that. He went inside.

There were two entrances into the building, both without doors and each leading into one of the two main rooms. Seeds chose the left-hand one. It was dark inside, only a dull light from the street lamps penetrated. There was a rank smell of sweat and urine. It was acrid. The enduring heat of the night just made it worse.

Two prisoners sat together, leaning up against the wall: an old man looking dishevelled and worn, and a young lad, equally bedraggled. Seeds called the older one ‘Grandad’; this was the nickname the guards had given him. It was the only name they used. Both men were handcuffed with plastic straps. A soldier was watching over them.

Seeds was incensed.

He turned on the guard.

‘What the fucking hell is going on here?’ he shouted. ‘Why are they cuffed like that?’

The guard told him they might escape. This was not a clever response. Captain Seeds ridiculed the soldier. Did he really fucking well think that this old man and young lad would tear off their plastic handcuffs, overpower him, overpower any other fucking guards about the detention facility and make their way out of the heavily defended and armed base? Did he?

The soldier thought not.

Too fucking right.

Seeds decided to look in the other room. To do so he had to pass the middle chamber, the old latrine. It had no door. He glanced inside. There was someone lying on the floor, covered with a sheet of cardboard, feet sticking out. Seeds thought the man was dead. But he carried on, angry, into the second main room, the one on the right of the building. Here there were several more prisoners lying about the hot and dirty floor. They looked ‘exhausted’. One was in a foetal position on the floor, knees curled up into his body, writhing with pain, unable to lie still. All of them had plasticuffs on.

With his temper barely under control, Captain Seeds asked one of the guards in the room whether the RMO, the doctor, had been to see the prisoners. He was told he had, although it wasn’t clear which men had been examined. Whoever it was, it didn’t look as though their conditions had been treated. And what about the man in the latrine? He was sleeping, the guards said. He wasn’t dead.

Captain Seeds checked the water lying around the room in plastic bottles. It was room temperature, hot, tepid at best. He sent a guard to fetch cold water.

A deepening sense of disgust gripped the captain. He ordered the guards to cut off the plasticuffs, but no one had anything that would do the job. Seeds strode off, back to the ops room in the headquarters building where he’d left his gear after returning from the patrol earlier that night. He picked up some clippers from his bag. Before hurrying back to the detention block, though, he decided to look in through the door of the battalion second in command. Major Christopher Süss-Francksen was Seeds’ immediate superior. His room was right next to ops. He was still awake.

‘You’ve got to see this,’ Seeds said, and asked him to come to the detention facility.

When the two officers walked into the detention block Captain Seeds immediately began to cut off the plasticuffs from each of the prisoners. He gave them cold water too. One asked to go to the toilet. He couldn’t raise himself off the floor. Seeds tried to help him up but the man was too heavy. Seeds looked around for help. But Süss-Francksen was gone. (The major had left. He wouldn’t return. In fact, by his own account he never came back. For quite some time a form of selective amnesia set in and he wouldn’t be able to recollect any visit to the detention block either that night or at any other time. Later, that would change slightly. A limited memory of the visit would come back but not much else. Even then he couldn’t remember seeing the detainees in any poor ‘state’. Cuffed; yes. In pain, injured; no. He’d seen no reason to stay, he said later.)

The guards were gone too. Seeds stepped outside looking for some assistance and saw Major Peter Quegan, a Territorial Army officer on his first overseas deployment, making his way to use the Portaloos. Quegan was a solicitor by profession. He was one of the many Territorial Army soldiers called up to serve in Iraq, to make up the complement of men of 1QLR. His role was to act as liaison with civilians, helping out with reconstruction projects, improving the relationship between military occupiers and Basra citizens. He wasn’t a fighter. But he was quite a character, instantly recognisable with his huge Colonel Blimp-like moustache and large glasses.

Seeds asked Quegan for help, and he readily agreed. Quegan walked in to find the prisoners there in a disgusting state. He was appalled, he would say later, and tried to assist Seeds with the prisoner lying on the floor. But even between them they couldn’t get the man up. Then one of the guards reappeared. Seeds must’ve thought he would stand more chance with the private than the major because he told Quegan he could go. Quegan didn’t hang around. With the private’s aid, Seeds eventually managed to take the prisoner to the toilet.

A kind of momentary calm set in after that. Captain Seeds was satisfied that the men were settled. They had been watered. He had released them from their cuffs. They may still have been in the squalid conditions of the detention block, but at least some relief had been administered.

And then Seeds went to bed. What else could he do? He’d been up nearly forty-eight hours and was exhausted. He didn’t report what he’d seen. The battalion second in command had been shown what was happening and knew as much as Seeds. Despite his disgust, his outrage at the condition of the detainees under the care of his battalion, he went to sleep and had nothing further to do with the matter. The only contributions he made in the immediately ensuing investigation were to answer some questions about the circumstances of Baha Mousa’s detention and to provide the Royal Military Police with an aerial photograph of Battle Group Main. That was the next day and two days later respectively. It doesn’t appear as though on either occasion he mentioned what he’d witnessed in the detention block that night. Perhaps he would’ve done had he realised that the detainees’ ordeal did not end with his intervention. There were still eight hours left to go before they were eventually loaded on to a truck and taken away to Camp Bucca.