British Airways Flight 149

 British Airways Flight 149 

G-AWND, the aircraft involved in the incident, seen in 1985
Description	Flight 149 landed in Kuwait City only two hours after Iraqi forces had started the 1990 invasion. The British government put the passengers in danger in order to insert military personnel engaged in a ‘black ops’ mission.

Remains of the aircraft

British Airways Flight 149 was a flight from London Heathrow Airport to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, via Kuwait and Madras International Airports, operated by British Airways carrying 385 passengers.

The flight happened at the same time as the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990, and would under normal circumstances have been redirected. The British government quickly added a special forces unit to the plane, and sent it on, resulting in the civilian passengers and crew being detained in Iraq.

Following their capture, the majority of the passengers and crew were initially detained at several nearby hotels along with other foreigners under armed guard. The airliner was later destroyed on the ground; the identity of those responsible for its destruction remains unknown.

Official narrative

At 18:05 GMT on 1 August 1990, British Airways Flight 149 (BA 149) departed from London Heathrow Airport with 367 passengers on board, its final destination was Kuala Lumpur with scheduled layovers in Kuwait City and Madras. The flight had been delayed at Heathrow for several hours; the official cause was a fault in the aircraft's auxiliary power unit.

The flight had a scheduled stopover at Kuwait City; however, this was not cancelled or changed despite media reports of the worsening political situation in the region. During the delay at Heathrow, the flight crew requested up to date reports on the situation in Kuwait and were told nothing untoward was happening despite news of growing tension.

BA's area manager for Kuwait and Iraq Laurie O'Toole later claimed to have contacted the British Embassy in Kuwait prior to BA 149's departure to ask if it was safe to continue flights within the region and was told that a full-scale invasion of Kuwait was unlikely. Very quickly, there was considerable public controversy over whether the British government would have been able to intervene to avoid Flight 149's detention. The reality was that the government willingly had risked it in order to achieve its covert military goal.

After leaving the aircraft, all the passengers and crew were captured on the ground by Iraqi forces. The majority of the detained passengers were initially transferred to the airport hotel within the boundaries of the airport until the crew of BA 149 negotiated for everyone to be moved to the Regency Hotel where British Airways crew and staff flying into Kuwait were routinely based. While some passengers were detained only for a few weeks, others were detained for months, often in poor conditions. During mid December 1990, the last of the remaining American and British captives were released by Iraq.

Cover for special forces

Stephen Davis investigated the incident while working for New Zealand Television. He was introduced to an SAS contact in Hereford, the regiment's home base. He told Davis that there was a secret team on the plane and that they worked for an ultra-secret group called the Increment, run by MI6, which draws upon Special Forces, SAS, SPS and MI6 to run missions "that governments would rather you not know about." He said it was too dangerous for him to talk about the group but instead he introduced Davis to a member of the Increment who had first-hand knowledge of the organization of the BA 149 mission.

One of his friends had actually been on the mission, selected for the job because of his ability to pass as an Arab. But the contact said he could not go public, as he would go to jail. The Ministry of Defence refused to discuss the allegations with NZTV. According to Davis' undercover sources, this was a Thatcher-driven operation. "She was extremely gung-ho about it.”

Drawn from former spies and soldiers, the eight (four teams of two) Increment members were whisked from the plane as soon as it landed, leaving the rest of those on board to be captured.

The soldiers reported back right from the start that the Iraqis were adopting defensive positions, and had no apparent intent to invade Saudi Arabia. This is directly the opposite of what Dick Cheney and Norman Schwarzkopf told King Fahd, justifying the US deployment of forces on Saudi soil.

Suppressed reports

Stephen Davis also talked to Bill Neumann in Houston, Texas, about his efforts to obtain a list of passengers from British Airways in connection with a compensation lawsuit. He too wanted to know the identities of the mystery men on the flight, but told BA did not have a passenger list.

Rather than permit potentially embarrassing depositions to be heard before a Texas jury and made public in Europe, British Airways settled in secret and paid substantial sums in excess of six figures to Neumann's clients. A French court ordered British Airways to pay at least £3 million in damages to the 61 French passengers, stating that the airline was ‘entirely responsible' for the landing in Kuwait. BA appealed twice but lost both times.

The British passengers got nothing. The House of Lords dismissed two appeals by BA 149 passengers against BA, upholding previous British court judgments that the airline did not have a case to answer, and meant that evidence against BA (and the British government) could not be presented in British courts.

Afterwards, British government commissioned a report, which they called Operation Sandcastle, by the military police, and they interviewed all the prisoners about the suffering that they had undergone in captivity...."It's a horror story of rapes, assaults, mock executions, near-starvation conditions. No sooner had they got this report, then they suppressed it, it was supposed to be tabled in Parliament, they suppressed it and called it an official secret. And still today, 30 years later, it's classified."<ref name=ninetonoon>

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References

This page imported content from Wikipedia on 22.11.2021.
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