After 30 Years, Britain Apologizes To The Passengers Who Were Used By Saddam As Human Shields In Kuwait

It took the British government 30 years to apologize Tuesday to the British Airways passengers who were taken hostage by Saddam Hussein and used as human shields, acknowledge that it did not warn the airline that Iraq invaded Kuwait, where the plane had landed.

Flight BA149 took off from London bound for Kuala Lumpur, and stopped in Kuwait, the capital, on August 2, 1990, hours after the Iraqi invasion of the country, which later led to the outbreak of the Second Gulf War.

The passengers were accommodated for several days in a nearby hotel under the control of the Iraqi Chief of Staff, and then taken to Baghdad and used as “human shields” in strategic locations.

Several of the 367 passengers and crew members spent more than four months in captivity, and were put in places that constituted potential attack targets for the Western alliance.

For three decades, ex-hostages have been striving to find out some information that specifically belongs to the British government, asking it to take responsibility.

British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss told Parliament on Tuesday that the British ambassador to Kuwait had informed London of an Iraqi invasion around midnight on August 2, 1990, that is, after the plane had taken off. However, no warning message had been sent to British Airways, which could have diverted plane path.

Trass acknowledged that “the ambassador’s appeal has never been disclosed and has not been publicly acknowledged until today, neither before Parliament nor before public opinion,” considering that “this failure is unacceptable.”

“As the current minister, I offer my apologies in Parliament and express my deepest sympathy to the people who have been detained and mistreated,” she added.

However, Truss rejected accusations made in a book published in Britain called Operation Trojan Horse that the government used the flight, which was officially two hours late due to “technical problems”, to send nine intelligence officials to Kuwait and was aware of the danger to civilians.

The book’s author, Stephen Davis, explains that London received information from American intelligence informing it of the Iraqi invasion, and adds that the control tower was refusing to land all other flights that night.

Barry Manners, 55, a former hostage, announced that he rejects the government’s apologies, which he accuses of also lying about British intelligence agents. ‘Members of the rugby team?, he added, “It was enough to look at them, I know they were soldiers.”

For its part, the airline, which has been accused of negligence and cover-up, welcomed “these documents confirming that British Airways was not informed of the invasion.”

 

SOURCE  :     TIMES KUWAIT

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