Fellow veterans question ex-SAS man’s hostage crisis tale
Colin Maclachlan promotes himself as a Special Air Service (SAS) hero who survived being kidnapped, stripped naked and forced to endure mock executions in Iraq. Since leaving the British army and forging a new career as an author, public speaker and TV personality, he has recounted his hostage ordeal at the hands of rogue policemen in the Iraqi city of Basra several times.
An autobiography called The Pilgrim, to be published next month, is being advertised with the words ‘‘soldier, hostage, survivor’’, and Maclachlan, 42, has given multiple interviews about what he claims happened to him and a colleague.
However, fellow SAS veterans say that he has conflated a hostage rescue operation that was endured by two other special forces soldiers in September 2005 with an apparently less violent event that happened to him a year earlier.
Maclachlan has also come to prominence in the past week over claims that were made in the draft copy of a separate special forces book, which has yet to be published, that he was with a group of SAS soldiers that allegedly killed mortally wounded Iraqi soldiers after an ambush in March 2003.
Maclachlan allegedly described, through a ghostwriter, how the detachment approached a convoy of Iraqi army vehicles that had just been hit by rockets close to Iraq’s border with Syria.
‘‘When we got there, I could see there were a number of seriously injured soldiers,’’ he is said to have recalled. ‘‘Special forces operatives quickly put them out of their misery.’’
The discovery of these comments by the Ministry of Defence, which was given advanced access to the book, titled SAS: Who Dares Wins, led to an inquiry by the military police. Other members of Maclachlan’s team could face investigation, even if the allegations turn out to be false, as is claimed by several former special forces soldiers.
Maclachlan left the army in May 2005 with the rank of sergeant, after several years in the SAS and the Royal Scots. He took on minor acting roles until his break as one of the four presenters of a TV series called Who Dares Wins, which first screened last year. He has also featured in a series called Secrets of the SAS: In Their Own Words.
In a podcast, Maclachlan has recounted his hostage ordeal.
‘‘They were ready to behead us, and then a tank burst through the walls and our own guys managed to come and rescue us, kind of at the 11th hour, but there was a massive mob outside and it was all over Sky News,’’ he said. ‘‘People remember a guy climbing out of a tank, and he was on fire.’’
The situation he describes took place on September 19, 2005, when British troops charged into a police station in Basra to rescue two special forces soldiers who had been tortured and subjected to mock executions.
By that time, however, Maclachlan had been out of the SAS for at least three months.
Maclachlan and a colleague were held captive by rogue Iraqi policemen after they were stopped at a checkpoint while travelling back to Basra from the Kuwaiti border in October or November 2004.
However, former SAS colleagues said they had never heard anything about the pair undergoing mock executions, or of Maclachlan having to ‘‘fight for his life’’ to avoid being bundled into the back of a car by men in balaclavas – another claim he has made.
Only Maclachlan and his fellow captive know what actually happened during their six-hour ordeal – a far shorter period than the hostage crisis a year later. However, sources insisted that there was no marauding mob outside the police station where they were held.
A solitary Land Rover drove him and his colleague away from the building ‘‘calmly and quietly’’, another former SAS man said.
‘‘There were no riots or all that sort of stuff.’’