Panel members shook their heads at the amateur colour photographs which painted a picture of the Army far from the glossy images used in recruitment campaigns.

Some of the photographs — developed from the camera of Fusilier Gary Bartlam, who was convicted last week — show naked Iraqi captives performing simulated acts of oral and anal sex.

Others show one of the defendants attacking a prisoner; in another frame a captured and bound Iraqi is suspended in a cargo net from the prongs of a forklift truck.

All the incidents are said to have occurred on a sultry day in May 2003, at Camp Bread Basket, a depot for humanitarian supplies about half a mile from Basra.

The three defendants were exhausted after long hours chasing civilians stealing food in the most exposed corner of the camp. Corporal Daniel Kenyon’s section of the 1st Battalion The Royal Regiment of Fusiliers had been allocated three plunderers. The brief, both the prosecution and defence teams agree, was to teach them a lesson. The robbers — in an operation dubbed Ali Baba — were to be deterred. The photographs, according to the indictments read out yesterday, chronicle the accumulated frustration of that day.

The forklift truck was used to deliver crates and sacks of flour, lifting it from a ground level delivery point onto the ramp of a warehouse.

The prosecution claims that some soldiers decided to use the spot to make sport of the Iraqis using improvised material available on the camp’s depot floor.

An Iraqi was trussed up, entwined in a cargo net and hoisted up on the prongs of a forklift truck used to deliver crates and sacks of flour. The prisoner swayed in the air, about two metres high, plainly fearful that he would be bumped against the wall or dropped. The driver of the truck, the prosecutor said, was Lance Corporal Mark Cooley.

Another picture shows the Iraqi prisoner released from the net, worn out, being splashed with water. The pool staining the area around the prisoner was water, not blood, said the prosecutor.

It was, argues the indictment, Lance Corporal Cooley, who pretended to punch a prisoner. The Iraqi in the photograph has never been traced and the prosecution is not trying to establish that an assault took place.

Three British soldiers have pleaded not guilty to all but one of the ten abuse charges which were backed by the photographic evidence. The most senior defendant Corporal Kenyon, 33, could face up to ten years in jail if found guilty. The victims of the abuses at the camp have not been traced.

The heavy-set defendants were marched under guard into the courtroom. The tribunal of seven officers in full dress uniform was urged not to be swayed emotionally by the “shocking and appalling pictures” they were handed by Lieutenant-Colonel Clapham, the prosecutor. Defence lawyers for the three men — Corporal Kenyon, Lance Corporal Darren Larkin, 30, and Lance Corporal Cooley, 25 — will argue in the month-long trial that the soldiers were acting on orders or at least within the framework of a vaguely expressed command given by the camp officer of Bread Basket, Major Dan Taylor.

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