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WHAT KIND OF man was Corporal Donald Payne? Few accounts by those who served with him failed to mention his physicality and the aura of violence he projected. Some said they were scared of him. He was regarded as a soldier to avoid. A ‘bully’ was one description. LCpl Adrian Redfearn felt intimidated by him. Private Gareth Aspinall spoke of his ‘reputation’. Private Aaron Cooper said he was known as a boxer, one of the hardest men in the battalion. Whether justified or not, stories of a brutal and brutalising Donald Payne were commonplace from the moment the investigation into Baha Mousa’s death began. But these were only stories. What else was known about him?

Payne wasn’t one of those soldiers lacking experience. Unlike many of the men in A Company he knew what it was like to be in a hostile environment and faced by an unseen and dangerous enemy. Now in his mid-thirties, his career in the army had begun in 1988. He started off as a drummer boy and was proud to have played before royalty before moving to the infantry. He joined 1QLR in mid-1989 when he first came into contact with Jorge Mendonça, who was then the regimental adjutant. By the time they were in Iraq, the two of them had become quite familiar. They used to take early-morning runs together around Battle Group Main, so Payne remembered, up at 5.30 am for an invigorating jog about the compound.

But it was before Iraq that Payne had acquired his battle experience. His service spanned the latter and bloody end of the Northern Ireland Troubles. He completed several tours in the province and was in Omagh the day of the bombing which killed twenty-nine and injured a further 220. His wife and he were out shopping in the town and they missed the explosion by minutes. Hearing the blast, he went back to help and for most of the day attended the temporary mortuary. It would make you hard, something like that.

By 2001, Corporal Payne had joined the Regimental Police, ensuring the good behaviour of members of the regiment, guarding those locked up for breach of army rules. They weren’t trained to handle civilians, though, Payne would say. That was a role only thrust upon him when he landed in Basra in July 2003. He learned the basics in Iraq, he said, from a tactical questioner soon after handover from the Black Watch who had occupied Battle Group Main prior to 1QLR. All that he did in the detention facility, the conditioning, the hooding, the stressing, he would say, had been in place then and he was expected, indeed ordered, to do the same.

On 29 September the SIB made arrangements for Payne’s arrest. Sergeant Andrew Gordon was assigned the duty.

The speed with which Corporal Payne was arrested in Battle Group Main (at 9.27 am, 1 October 2003), his accommodation searched (by 11.15 am), taken to Basra airport and escorted on to an army transport plane and flown out to Britain (at 3 am, 2 October), conveyed on landing to Camp Bulford in Wiltshire (arriving at 9.30 pm on the 2nd), cautioned, provided with a legal representative, and seated, awaiting interview on his involvement in the death of Baha Mousa (by 11.44 am, 3 October), must have been dizzying. From the heat of Iraq to the dank cold of an English autumn. Little wonder that Sergeant Gordon, who had accompanied him throughout, should begin the questioning by asking whether Corporal Payne had had plenty of sleep and refreshments. A disoriented and jetlagged interviewee might not provide the most accurate and considered information. But Payne had no complaints.

Gordon asked the corporal to fill him in on some background first. Payne told him about his appointment as provost corporal when he arrived in Basra during June 2003. He said he was made responsible for looking after Iraqis captured during 1QLR operations. These men would be held in the holding area, the three-roomed building they called the detention facility. Major Michael Peebles was the officer he reported to and Payne insisted he was never in charge of the guards unit. This was the responsibility of the operations officer, Captain Seeds. It was Seeds who would assign guards from the companies in Battle Group Main, usually members of the platoon who had made the arrests, dividing them into shifts, or ‘stags’, groups of two or more soldiers, to look after any detained Iraqis.

Corporal Payne said he knew nothing about Operation Salerno (when the detainees had been arrested), he hadn’t been briefed about possible prisoners arriving and was only made aware that morning of 14 September. He recalled the prisoners had eventually appeared bound with plasticuffs. He had searched them and taken down their details and then had them spread between the two main rooms of the detention facility. The detainees were made to stand, but as time went on they would get tired and the guards would let them kneel. They would have their arms outstretched, he said, but not at shoulder height, more like waist level so their hands could be seen. Payne said the detainees had sandbag hoods over their heads. This was normal. The detainees would be given water and if they became tired they would be allowed to sit down cross-legged. Once every couple of hours, he said, each detainee would be walked around for some exercise. It all sounded quite gentle if Payne was to be believed.

Payne also said that the medical officer came and saw the detainees about three or four times to check on their condition. As far as he knew, there were no medical issues, no complaints from the detainees and no violence done to them by him or anyone else. The only problem was with the sandbags. He said that normally once a prisoner had been interrogated they would remove the hoods and let them relax a bit. After the first round of questioning, during the night of the 14th and early morning of the 15th, the tactical questioner (he didn’t know the man’s name) ordered the sandbags to be left on and the detainees to be kept awake. Payne said the TQer had told the guards to bang iron bars on the floor.

Then Sergeant Gordon asked about Baha Mousa.

‘He was difficult,’ Payne said. After he’d been subjected to TQing, he started getting out of his cuffs. Payne didn’t know how, but he managed it several times. Payne said the TQer told him to cuff Mousa’s thumbs, and when that didn’t work, to cuff his hands to his ankles. That was hopeless too. So the TQer told him to put Mousa in the toilet area, the middle room of the detention facility. Eventually Mousa quietened down and Payne thought the problem was over.

Much later, at about 9 pm on the night of the 15th, Payne said he became worried that a relief for the guards on duty at the detention facility hadn’t turned up. He’d checked the ops room and discovered the relief stag would be coming back to Battle Group Main shortly. When a Saxon truck containing the replacement guards finally arrived, he made his way over to the detention block, entering by the left-hand door. As he passed the middle toilet room he saw Mousa standing up with his cuffs off again and his sandbag removed from his head. He thought he was trying to escape. Payne said he pushed him back into the toilet area and got the man down on the floor. Payne said he had hold of the man’s arm, and then Private Cooper and LCpl Redfearn had appeared. Payne said Cooper got hold of the man’s other arm, the man was struggling violently. Payne said he put his knee in his back, but the prisoner pulled his arm free from Cooper’s grasp. Payne said he grabbed both arms, applied more pressure, but the prisoner was still struggling and … and he banged his head. Payne said Cooper checked for a pulse, but Payne decided to call for the MO anyway. That was it.

‘How did Mousa bang his head?’ Sergeant Gordon wanted to know.

He was thrashing about, Payne told him, but his back was turned and he didn’t see. He heard the crack, though. It could have been against the floor, it could have been the wall. With Private Cooper’s assistance he quickly sat Mousa up, but his head was lolling to one side and his body sort of flopped and he realised there was something wrong. That’s when they tried his pulse.

Sergeant Gordon asked whether Payne had kicked or punched Mousa or any of the other detainees.

‘No,’ said Payne.

Had he grabbed him around the neck, pulled his clothing about his throat?

‘No.’

He couldn’t tell Gordon how the detainees had received the bruising and injuries found later either. Payne did manage to say that he’d complained to the TQer about the orders to keep the bags on and not let the detainees sleep after they had been interrogated. And he said Major Peebles had been present when he’d said this. Payne thought the orders were wrong, but he had to follow them, didn’t he?

Whether wittingly or not Corporal Payne had now implicated an officer. He may still have been in the frame for the death, but by his account the whole system had been imposed on him. Now there wasn’t only the tactical questioners who were involved. The internment officer, Major Peebles, was too. So how far up the chain of command did this go?