Ruling draws a line under 13-year legal fight after Battle of Danny Boy

£21,949,879, according to figures obtained through a Freedom of Information request. The release of the figures comes after Leigh Day solicitors Martyn Day, Sapna Malik and Anna Crowther were cleared of any wrongdoing in pursuing compensation actions for claimants who were later said to have told “deliberate lies”.

The decision finally drew a line under a 13-year legal fight sparked by the Battle of Danny Boy in May 2004, when British troops were given an order to remove the bodies of the 20 Iraqi dead and take them back to a nearby camp along with nine prisoners of war.

The detainees would go on to claim they had been mistreated and heard the torture and murder of their compatriots.

Among the dead was Hamid Al-Sweady, 19, who gave his name to a public inquiry after his uncle Khuder Al-Sweady claimed he had been murdered at the British camp.

The figures show most of the claims, totalling 1,145 over the six years until British withdrawal in 2009, were settled for £2.1m by the MoD’s area claims officer in Iraq and did not reach public attention in Britain.

The MoD has agreed £19.8m in out-of-court settlements in 326 cases, out of a further 1,200 claims for wrongful imprisonment or mistreatment, brought before the UK courts. These peaked in 2012/13 when 191 claimants received £9.9m in payouts, which are subject to confidentiality agreements, while the latest settlement was a £30,000 payment in 2016/17.

The MoD FoI response said: “The reason for the settlement of the overwhelming majority of claims received is not, as has been reported, that the MoD accepts the claimants were maltreated.”

Payouts were in line with a European Court of Human Rights decision in 2011 on unlawful detention but the Strasbourg court changed position in a similar case in

2014, and the MoD said it had since ceased payments.

The cost to the public purse is likely to be far higher, and has reportedly reached £100m, but the MoD declined to give a figure for payments in relation to court costs, citing confidentiality.