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DESPITE THE DAILY Mirror picture hoax, the stories of maltreatment wouldn’t disappear. The day after the paper made its apologies, the ITV programme Tonight with Trevor McDonald featured another exposé. An unnamed soldier from the Queen’s Lancashire Regiment wanted to tell his story to the world. Or so the programme advertised. His identity was disguised because he feared for his safety. He was able to say how detainees had been treated with contempt and violence. It sickened him that army spokesmen would come on TV and deny that these abuses happened regularly. It made him angry. He had come forward because those in command were simply hoping the stories would go away, that they would be buried. As far as he was concerned, they knew what had been going on.

The edited conversation between Sir Trevor McDonald and the anonymous soldier made for extraordinary television.

The soldier said ‘I just wish that instead of trying to dismiss everything they should hold up their hands, take some responsibility for some of it.’

McDonald said ‘What did you see?’

The soldier said ‘I saw prisoners punched, slapped, kicked, pushed around. Sandbags zipped tight. I saw them in those sandbags for hours and hours on end.’

McDonald said ‘Were they beaten?’

The soldier said ‘Yes, they were beaten. They were beaten for fun.’

The soldier condemned the lack of control exercised in Iraq. He had seen things that deeply disturbed him. No one had said anything at the time to stop it.

The soldier said ‘It was not all the army. It was not systematic. But it did happen. It was isolated incidences and I believe a lot of the British soldiers didn’t know that it was going on – maybe that’s part of the problem, that it’s kept so hush-hush when things are reported.’

Lance Corporal Ali Aktash was the soldier who gave the interview. A member of the Territorial Army, he had been mobilised in July 2003 to serve in Iraq. He was trained as a signaller and was assigned to 209 Signal Squadron initially. Halfway though his tour, though, he was transferred to 1QLR. On 15 September he was working in the operations room at Battle Group Main. At some point he went to the detention block to use the Portaloos outside. He heard noises coming from within the building; the sound of hitting, thumps. Like so many other soldiers he had walked into the block. He saw Corporal Payne slap and shout at the detainees and at one point put his hand around the bagged head of a prisoner and force his thumb into the man’s eye. He saw other soldiers abuse the detainees. Aktash said that prior to being taken for questioning, a couple of guards made a prisoner run around outside the detention block. As he had no belt, the prisoner’s trousers kept falling down. Everyone laughed and mocked. ‘It was quite a comical sight,’ Aktash admitted. But the acts of random viciousness rather than idle humiliation shocked him.

Even before Trevor McDonald’s programme got hold of his story Ali Aktash had revealed what he knew to the SIB. He had been caught up in the Daily Mirror photograph story. It was this that hauled him into the media tornado.

He had finished his tour of duty and was back in the UK when the Mirror pictures appeared. A friend had spoken to him in the pub about the pictures. Aktash had told his mate how they could well be true – that kind of stuff did happen, he had said. Somehow the information had been passed to the Mirror who called Aktash when suspicions about the validity of the pictures began to appear in the press. He was persuaded to go the Mirror’s offices in London and look at the photos. Perhaps it was thought he could vindicate the paper’s decision to publish the pictures. It was a rearguard action that eventually proved fruitless. But it also brought Ali Aktash to light as another witness of fact. He was one more for the SIB to add to the growing list.