Hounding heroes

To The Daily Telegraph

The hounding of soldiers for alleged abuses while on active service should be stamped out.

The situation involving soldiers who served in Iraq is in the public domain. Fewer may know of the Historical Enquiries Team (HET), operating between 2005 and 2014, set up by the Police Service of Northern Ireland to investigate more than 3,000 unresolved deaths between 1968 and 1998. Retired police officers tracked down soldiers involved in incidents where there had been a death.

In 2010, aged well into my 60s, I received in the post a package from the HET covered by a letter from the Ministry of Defence which said I would be required for questioning about an incident in which I had been involved in Belfast in 1971. The MOD would provide legal support through a large firm of London solicitors.

The package included a copy of the report I had made to the Royal Military Police immediately after the incident. Interviews would be held under caution and recorded. At the solicitors’, a partner told me: “I’ve a good deal of experience defending ex-soldiers. I was involved in the second Bloody Sunday inquiry. In fact, that bought

me my house.” There lies a tale. It was almost two years before I was interviewed at the solicitors’ offices, by two ex-policemen. On conclusion and after stopping the tape, they said that the next stage would be another inquest, but added that we’d all be dead by the time that happened.

Enormous sums were spent on a futile exercise, the hounding of elderly men, 40 years after the event. It was a travesty when one considers that convicted IRA murderers are walking the streets having been released after the Good Friday Agreement. Robert Williams, Leeds, West Yorkshire