18

THE SUSPENSION OF family life lasted four days. Even though there was no specific reason to fear for Baha’s safety, there was still mounting unease. His two young sons couldn’t understand why their father had gone. No one could. It didn’t make sense to them. The whole family could do little but wait.

On Thursday 18 September, Daoud Mousa and his family were still gathered, anxious, in their home in Basra. The one concern was Baha’s whereabouts. What had happened to him? What could they do?

Then at 2.30 pm, according to the SIB’s log, a small convoy of RMP armoured vehicles pulled up outside their home. It was a military-style operation. The whole area was quickly secured by British soldiers, fearful of attack. This was the way of things in Basra then. Nowhere was considered safe. Any dismount from vehicles had to be accompanied by defensive measures that invariably looked hostile. Soldiers with rifles watching everyone with suspicion. It was intimidating.

SSgt Daren Jay had the duty to inform the next of kin about what had happened to Baha Mousa. He was let into the home, into the main living area, where the extended family sat crowding the chairs and sofas. Jay was direct. Baha was dead. He had been in custody. Now he was dead. He had been killed. Daoud said later that the word ‘torture’ was used. There was an investigation under way, they were promised. Those responsible would be caught and held to account. The first step was to confirm the identity of the deceased. Daoud would be required to go to the mortuary, to see his son’s body.

Baha’s sons and nephews, the children who were dependent on him, the whole family gathered in that large living room listened as Daoud tried to translate what he had been told. He said later that the children understood.

No matter how ruptured, a corpse needs more than a suspected name, more than a tag fitted to a big toe, a bracelet or a certificate, to be truly claimed. It demands personal recognition, one final visual confirmation of an existence now expunged. Acquaintance is insufficient. Familiarity with the contours and clefts of a physical form are essential to penetrate the disguises of the inanimate body. However much one seeks the person in the clues of a face, identity can be elusive. Eyelids closed can transform features so that confident identification becomes impaired. And in the absence of conviction, a body cannot be buried, an investigation can be stalled, grief suspended.

The prerequisite of intimacy, the need for certainty, meant SSgt Jay had to ask Daoud Mousa to accompany him to the hospital mortuary to see the body of his son. There was no one else.

The journey was blurred for Mousa. Later he couldn’t remember whether he went on his own or another member of his family went with him. But he can recall being taken into a room where a body lay beneath a white shroud. The coverall was lifted and the body beneath was exposed. Daoud Mousa said it was naked; nose bloody and broken; bruising across face and body; deep gashes around the wrists and ankles; that was what he saw. His son.

He wanted to take the body away – his son – but he was told he had to wait until the post-mortem had been conducted. A doctor was coming from the UK. It would take a few more days, probably four. He demanded an Iraqi doctor to be employed as well, to confirm the cause of death. He still had that much self-possession. His trust for the British had evaporated. And he wanted to know what had killed him – his son – what these devastating wounds about the body meant. ‘Torture’ was such an ugly word. It turned the fact of death into a story of pointless suffering. He had to know what was signified by those injuries, what had been endured and why.

With formal identification complete, Daoud Mousa was taken home and left to relay to his family what he had seen. The ritual of lamentation had to be honoured; that was a duty. It could not be concluded without the body. The grief had to be sustained. And surely it was amplified by what Daoud Mousa knew. He may have been a man used to violence in his professional life; as a long-serving investigative police officer he must have been equipped with the ability to distance himself from the cruel facts of victimhood. But this wasn’t an anonymous casualty whose fate had to be reconstructed through a patchwork of disparate evidence. It was his son and he knew things that must have accentuated the anguish. He had seen his son, an innocent, arrested; he had heard the assurance that everything would be fine; he had seen his son placed in the care of an authority supposedly steeped in discipline and respect for the laws of war; he had seen him taken away secure in armed vehicles to be kept in an army establishment where random threat should have had no place; he had seen him taken away to safety; and he had seen the body in the aftermath of death. With that evidential certainty he must have had the capacity to imagine his son’s last experiences. He would have been able to envisage what those moments must have been like. The state of his body gave him limitless signals to provoke that imagining, to visualise the suffering that ultimately ended with a hopeless struggle to breathe, to live. It was a legacy to foster nightmare and fury.