Families’ fury as Mail reveals top brass ‘cover-up’
FAMILIES of Marines killed in Afghanistan accused military chiefs of ‘covering their backs’ yesterday as the Mail published a leaked report revealing how failings were hushed up.
Outraged relatives said they had been kept in the dark about devastating mistakes on the battlefield exposed in a Navy internal inquiry codenamed Operation Telemeter.
The secret dossier, leaked to the Mail, showed how the men were catastrophically let down by commanders on the ‘tour from hell’ in 2011.
Military chiefs tried to hide the blunders, refusing to publish the damning 50-page report and releasing only the executive summary with key sections blotted out by the censor’s black pen.
But the Mail’s uncensored version reveals that top brass confessed that the Marines of 42 Commando were pushed to be ‘overly aggressive’, and blamed officers for failing to spot the mental strain and fatigue being suffered by their men.
The MoD had censored the admission of command failings in Helmand. In public, it solely blamed Sgt Blackman for his actions on the day of the shooting.
But its report said: ‘Supervision by a commanding officer where Blackman and his men were based was insufficient to identify a number of warning signs that could have indicated they were showing evidence of moral regression, psychological strain and fatigue.’
After pressure from the Mail, defence ministers caved in on Wednesday and offered the full 50-page Telemeter report to Blackman’s lawyers. Last night the family of a Marine who was killed on the disastrous 2011 tour voiced their anger.
Lance Corporal Martin Gill, 22, died when he was shot by insurgents on June 5. His uncle Paul Gunter, 65, of Gedling, Nottinghamshire, said it came as ‘little surprise’ that the family were not informed of the Telemeter inquiry as ‘the MoD tries to cover its back anyway wherever possible’.
He added: ‘It is only through newspaper campaigns such as this that these sort of things end up coming to the fore.’
Mr Gunter acknowledged that certain parts of the report may need to be kept under wraps for security reasons, but he called on top brass to make as much of it public as possible, adding: ‘The report needs to be published in full so the public can form their own opinions of what actually went on during this tour of duty.’