MoD paid out £22m in Iraq war compensation

TAXPAYERS footed a bill of more than £20m to settle compensation claims against the British military during the Iraq war.

The Ministry of Defence (MoD) settled 1,471 claims from Iraqi nationals between 2003/04 and 2016/17, paying out £21,949,879, according to figures obtained by the Press Association through a Freedom of Information (FoI) request.

The release of the figures comes after Leigh Day solicitors Martyn Day, Sapna Malik and Anna Crowther were cleared of any wrongdoing in pursuing compensation actions for claimants who were later said to have told “deliberate lies”.

The decision finally drew a line under a 13-year legal fight sparked by the Battle of Danny Boy in May 2004, when British troops were given an order to remove the bodies of the 20 Iraqi dead and take them back to a nearby camp along with nine prisoners of war.

The detainees, who were insurgents with the Shia militia Mahdi Army, would go on to claim they had been mistreated and heard the torture and murder of their compatriots.

Among the dead was 19-year-old Hamid Al-Sweady, who gave his name to a public inquiry and was named after his uncle Khuder AlSweady claimed he had been murdered at the British camp.

Former colour sergeant Brian Wood, who fought in the battle as a lance corporal in the Princess of Wales’ Royal Regiment, described the legal process as an “ordeal” and added he was “just looking forward to getting on with my life now”.

The figures show most of the claims, totalling 1,145 over the six years until British withdrawal in 2009, were settled for £2.1 million by the MoD’s area claims officer in Iraq and did not reach public attention in Britain.

The MoD has agreed £19.8 million in out-of-court settlements in 326 cases, out of a further 1,200 claims for wrongful imprisonment or mistreatment, brought before the UK courts. These peaked in 2012/13 when 191 claimants received £9.9m in payouts, which are subject to confidentiality agreements, while the latest settlement was a £30,000 payment in 2016/17.

The MoD FoI response said: “The reason for the settlement of the overwhelming majority of claims received is not, as has been reported, that the MoD accepts that the claimants were maltreated.”

Payouts were in line with a European Court of Human Rights decision in 2011 on unlawful detention but the Strasbourg court changed position in a similar case in 2014, and the MoD said it had since ceased payments.