They pleaded with us to do it... they were in agony
will only affect soldiers who fight in future wars, not those currently facing investigation.
It also comes at a time of growing fury over the treatment of Royal Marine Sergeant Alexander Blackman who has spent nearly three years in jail for killing a dying Taliban insurgent in Afghanistan in 2011.
He was given a mandatory life sentence and ordered to serve a minimum of ten years, later reduced to eight. However in the 1982 Falklands war, an anonymous British Army sergeant was cleared of any wrongdoing under the Geneva Convention after shooting dead an Argentinian prisoner of war who was mortally wounded in an explosion following the battle of Goose Green.
Last night, Tory MP Ian Liddell-Grainger called on the MoD to drop the inquiry into Maclachlan, saying: ‘For once, start protecting our soldiers as opposed to pursuing them’.
He said the soldier’s plight ‘proved the Prime Minister’s point that we should give our soldiers immunity when they go to war’.
Mr Liddell-Grainger added: ‘Nobody but nobody in the British Armed Forces is a mindless killer. That’s not why they join the Forces.’
Maclachlan last night described the incident which has triggered the police inquiry.
It took place in March 2003 after 60 troops from the SAS’s D Squadron joined American agents from the CIA on a mission to eliminate elite Iraqi Army units.
In the weeks before the incident, Maclachlan’s commanders recruited their own militia force of local Iraqis to assist them, whom they paid in US dollars. These men, nicknamed the ‘Scorpion Force’, were then used to man checkpoints on roads used by Saddam’s henchmen fleeing Iraq into Syria.
Maclachlan describes how, on the day of the incident, 35 SAS troops travelling in specially adapted Land Rovers drove into covered positions on the high ground on either side of a desert highway.
Maclachlan says he and his heavily armed colleagues watched the Scorpion Force set up a roadblock and waited for hours, hoping the presence of the militia would persuade Iraqi Army units to launch an attack. Suddenly three Iraqi Army
vehicles were spotted approaching the checkpoint.
An SAS officer sent a radio message to the Scorpion Force commander telling him to abandon the area. SAS troops then opened fire, striking the vehicles with Milan anti-tank rockets which caused huge explosions. Afterwards, UK snipers eliminated the ‘runners’ – Iraqi troops seeking to flee the wreckage on foot.
Then, Maclachlan says he and about eight other SAS troops drove their Land Rovers from the high ground to the checkpoint.
He told The Mail on Sunday last night how, after surveying the charred remains of the three vehicles, it was clear there were a number of Iraqi casualties.
He said: ‘We treated those we could save using tourniquets but there were three wounded guys who were very close to death. Two of these guys were disembowelled, the other had severe blast wounds and had lost three of his limbs.
‘They would have been dead in anything from a few minutes to an hour or two at the maximum.
‘These guys were pleading for us to do it, they were in agony. We also knew how we would have wanted to be treated in that situation.
‘The crueller thing would have been to continue their suffering.
‘If I ever met their families I would explain what happened. Should I really have just left them there, dying, screaming and burning for the next hour?
‘I know there’s no law that says you can finish someone off, so it’s murder. But we are compassionate human beings, not robots. This is the harsh reality of combat with ordinary servicemen, and that’s what we are, being put in positions of extraordinary decision-making.’
Mr Maclachlan completed his tour of duty in Iraq with the SAS in 2003 and returned to the country in 2005. It was then that he and an SAS colleague were kidnapped by insurgents and held captive in a police station in Basra.
The SAS men were badly beaten and tortured before they were rescued as part of a dramatic mission which triggered a riot in the city. Locals managed to set alight a Warrior armoured vehicle and shocking pictures were seen around the world of a British soldier jumping from his vehicle to escape the blaze.
After leaving the Army, Maclachlan, a father of two, earned a firstclass degree, then shot to fame as one of the four former Special Forces instructors on the hit Channel 4 programme SAS: Who Dares Wins which saw ordinary members of the public being put through a gruelling series of physical and mental tests based on the SAS’s selection course. A second series of the show, set in the jungles of Brunei, is due to start on Channel 4 tomorrow. But following a dispute with producers earlier this year, Maclachlan is not part of the cast. The success of the series persuaded publishers Headline to commission a book about how SAS skills can be used in non-military professions, which contained the passage that prompted the murder probe. The book, out next month, features ideas on leadership and decisionmaking from Maclachlan and the other ex-Special Forces instructors, Anthony Middleton, Jason Fox and Matthew Ollerton. Maclachlan had submitted the passage about ‘mercy killings’ as part of a chapter called Handling the Dirty Work.
Before describing the shootings at the checkpoint, he writes: ‘Sometimes in the Special Forces we are called upon to execute an unpleasant task, one that makes us feel uncomfortable, even though we know its success is imperative for the greater good.’
Last night, an MoD official inside the Government said there were well-established procedures for considering manuscripts submitted by former personnel for publication.
An MoD spokesman added: ‘Our Armed Forces will continue to be held to the very highest standards.
‘Credible allegations of criminal behaviour will always be investigated properly.’