British volunteer’s training saved lives of Ukrainian troops before sniper killed him
A BRITISH volunteer killed by a sniper in Ukraine saved the lives of comrades in his international unit before he died, an inquest was told yesterday.
Jordan Gatley, 24, was shot in the head on June 10 in Severodonetsk after leaving the British Army and joining an international unit of fighters after Russia’s invasion.
A “skilled rifleman”, Gatley, was a lance corporal in The Rifles regiment based in Edinburgh. But when the war broke out, he told his parents he wanted “to do whatever he could”, his mother told Oxford Coroner’s Court in a statement. He was “adamant ... he could help the people of Ukraine with his skills” and by early June he and other volunteers were in the eastern city.
A Russian sniper shot him as he checked for Ukrainian casualties in a bombed-out building. A tank was then prevented from firing on his unit by a fighter he had trained in the use of antitank weaponry who deployed his weapon against it, his mother Sally Gatley added.
“They felt Jordan ultimately saved everyone else’s lives,” she said. Another inquest held yesterday was told that the first British volunteer to die in Ukraine was killed by mortar fire on April 22.
Scott Sibley, 36, a former Royal Marine, was killed in the village of Lymany in the southern Mykolayiv region. A fellow fighter, US citizen Gene “AJ” Smith, was quoted as telling a British consular official that Sibley “was an excellent sniper” who spent three days in his foxhole.
A team came to relieve him on the third day, but a drone had located the pair and their foxhole came under heavy artillery fire, so Sibley ran towards the next dugout. “As he was running, another mortar struck him, killing him instantly,” senior coroner Darren Salter said.
A post-mortem at Oxford’s John Radcliffe Hospital determined that the father of three daughters, who had served in Afghanistan, was killed instantly. “There is nothing that could have been done to save his life,” the coroner said.
His mother, Mary Sibley, said in a statement when her son “heard on the news about women and children being abused (in Ukraine), he wanted to help”.
“Scott would do anything to help anyone,” she said.