Cleared twice but they kept chasing me
A DECORATED soldier suffered years of torment as he was relentlessly hounded by Public Interest Lawyers for an incident 13 years ago.
Richard Catterall, 46, was dragged through three investigations for shooting dead an Iraqi, only to be cleared each time simply for doing his duty.
Suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, the father-of-two repeatedly begged to be left alone to the point that investigators feared he would take his own life.
The former sergeant has never properly recovered, and is too unwell to speak after he waived his anonymity and revealed his harrowing ordeal to the Daily Mail earlier this year.
But after learning that PIL would close, his 22-year-old daughter Demi, speaking on his behalf, said last night: ‘This is incredible news. The awareness the Daily Mail raised on this matter has clearly had a huge impact.
‘Many many soldiers will no longer suffer for doing their job. Nobody should go through what it put not only on my dad but the whole family. It was horrendous.’
Mr Catterall killed a suspected insurgent he believed was carrying an AK-47 and was about to shoot his comrades in Basra in 2003.
Two inquiries cleared him of unlawfully killing Muhammad Salim, but then he faced a further investigation when the man’s family tried to get compensation through PIL.
During the case, it emerged that Mr Salim’s grieving wife had been persuaded by an agent called Abu Jamal to make the claim in the weeks after her husband’s death.
Her testimony was the strongest proof yet that PIL had used an agent who had cold-called potential clients.
It was also revealed that he could be quizzed by the International Criminal Court after PIL passed it a file of over 1,200 cases of alleged wrongdoing. Then in the conclusion of the case, it emerged PIL had relied on a document that was doctored to make it look like the British military was to blame.
In a scathing attack on PIL, the chairman of the third investigation said that if the document had come to light sooner and Mr Salim’s family had been given ‘balanced and measured legal advice’, the case may never have been pursued.
Publishing his report, Sir George Newman, inspector of the Iraq Fatality Investigations, said any ‘reasonable trained soldier’ would have believed his life to be in danger in the circumstances.
He added: ‘S011 (Mr Catterall) was entitled to act in self-defence, and I have concluded that sufficient circumstances did exist to justify the belief on his part that he was in danger.’
Mr Catterall was medically discharged from the Army in 2014 after 23 years of service.
‘Nobody should go through it’