I’d have done just the same – hero Colonel backs ‘murder Marine’ fight
A RETIRED Royal Marines chief last night launched a passionate defence of Alexander Blackman, saying the jailed commando had done ‘nothing immoral’.
Falklands veteran Lieutenant Colonel Ewen Southby-Tailyour OBE, 73, stepped forward to declare that he would do the same in similar circumstances.
The son of Sir Norman Tailyour, a former Commandant General of the Royal Marines, revealed that he had once put a wounded man on the battlefield ‘out of his misery’.
His letter to the Daily Mail was one of thousands of messages of support to arrive yesterday for Sergeant Blackman, who was jailed for murder for shooting a wounded Taliban gunman in Afghanistan in 2011, pushing the sum donated for his legal fight to more than £100,000.
Lt-Col Southby-Tailyour said: ‘I do not believe for one moment that what Sergeant Blackman did was illegal, immoral, or wrong under the circumstances: it was, frankly, sheer common sense and I would have done (indeed I have done) the same.’ During the 1982 Falklands War, when he served as an adviser to the Taskforce, he claimed to know the practice happened at the Battle of Goose Green.
A host of politicians including former defence ministers and MPs have joined forces with the public to demand the case be re- examined. Baron Burnett, a Lib Dem peer, will today raise the case in the House of Lords ‘as a matter of national concern’, he said.
A Daily Mail investigation has revealed how key evidence was blocked from being heard at his court martial, and now an army of outraged readers has responded to our call for justice.
In his letter, Lt Col SouthbyTailyour – who was awarded the OBE and has a string of medals to his name – wrote ‘in total support’ of the campaign.
A veteran of service in Northern Ireland, Yemen, the Dhofar War in Oman and the Falkland Islands, he said: ‘From the beginning of warfare, fatally wounded combatants – both friend and foe – and for whom there is no hope, have been “put out of their misery”. This has always been the case.
‘I know of one case in the Falklands Campaign (I am sure there were others) when a mortally wounded Argentine was shot at Goose Green. There was no hope for him and he was put out of his misery, humanely and swiftly.’ He revealed he had given a lethal overdose of morphine to a dying comrade, his Arab Sergeant Major, during the Dhofar War on the Arabian Peninsula in 1968, when he was on secondment to the Sultan of Oman’s forces, as an act of mercy.
He added: ‘I suggest the only “non-crime” Sergeant Blackman committed will be found in his unfortunately-recorded choice of words. Yet what the judges and the public will never understand is that the horror of battle has a patois all its own that those who have not experienced it will find uncomfortable when quoted in the calm of a court room or on the pages of a newspaper.’
A 76-year-old widow from Devon donated part of her army pension.
Alix Quested, whose husband Major David Quested died in 1989 after fighting in Malaya in the 1950s and Brunei during the 1960s Indo-Malaysian conflict, offered £25 from her service widow’s pension and said: ‘I would have given ten times as much if I could.’
Sergeant Blackman, 41, of Taunton, Devon, shot the Taliban gunman who had already been mortally wounded trying to attack a British outpost in Helmand Province. He is believed to be the only British serviceman convicted of murder on the battlefield.
Sir Menzies Campbell, former Liberal Democrat leader, said: ‘These were clearly very special circumstances, the nature of which it is very difficult to under- stand unless you find yourself in the same position as this man.’
Scottish Labour justice spokesman Graeme Pearson said: ‘Sergeant Blackman was placed in a position of enormous stress, facing death and witnessing death in the most dreadful of circumstances.
‘The case should be referred to the Criminal Cases Review Commission to decide whether a miscarriage of justice has occurred.’
Tory MSP Alex Johnstone said: ‘It is too easy to sit in judgment in the safety of a courtroom when looking at split-second decisions made in the heat of battle.
‘Sergeant Blackman should be released and retried on the lesser charge of manslaughter.’
‘There was no hope for him’