MORE than 2,000 British soldiers were sent to serve in Iraq even though they had failed a basic weapons test, it was revealed yesterday.

The Territorial Army reservists, who should not even have been allowed access to a firing range, were sent to the Gulf war zone in a direct contravention of Army regulations.

Some of the country’s highest ranking officers have now been ordered by a court to explain how the mass “watering down” of standards was allowed to happen.

Many reservists were so poor at handling their weapons that they arrived in southern Iraq with notes warning that they had been graded as a “high” safety risk. Others did not even know how to make a rifle “point straight”.

The extraordinary number of test failures — representing more than a third of the TA soldiers who took part in Operation Telic — was revealed at the court martial of a soldier who faces a manslaughter charge over the death of another British soldier in Iraq.

Lance Corporal Ian Blaymire, 23, a plumbing and heating engineer in civilian life, is accused of shooting dead his friend, Sergeant John Nightingale, 32, in an accident at their barracks near Basra. He denies the accusation. Both reservists were serving with the Royal LogisticCorps as transport supply drivers.

The court martial at Catterick, North Yorkshire, has heard evidence from the defence that Lance Corporal Blaymire was among 949 TA soldiers who were sent to Iraq despite failing a weapon-handling test at the Reserve Training and Mobilisation Centre in Chilwell, Nottingham over a seven-month period. All had either failed to achieve the “skilled” standard required in all five sections of the Army weapon-handling test — which assessed tasks including loading, unloading, strapping, assembly and magazine filling — or had been under the guidance of incompetent instructors. Five arms instructors at Chilwell, it was revealed, were “not competent” because they had not achieved the required standard in their own weapon-handling test.

Sergeant-Major John Drain, a senior instructor at Chilwell who was being cross-examined by Simon Reevell, for the defence, agreed that none of the 949 soldiers “should have been deployed” to Iraq.

Equivalent figures for the full period of the mobilisation exercise at the centre, from January 2003, have not been made available to the court, but the Judge Advocate, Paul Camp, said that a similar pattern of test results would produce a total of 2,300 “failing” reservists. Some are still serving in the Gulf.

Captain Andrew McIntyre, who is based at Chilwell, had earlier told the hearing that it had become “accepted policy” along his chain of command that soliders who failed or received only an average mark in the weapons test should be approved for deployment, even though this contravened the requirements of the Army Operational Shooting Policy.

Sergeant-Major Drain told the court that he had been deeply frustrated by the lapse in standards and had written a series of letters to warn fellow instructors and senior officers of the dangers inherent in sending such troops to Iraq. In one letter, in June 2003, three months before Sergeant Nightingale was shot in the chest at point blank range inside the Shaibah military camp near Basra, he urged instructors to “take a hard look in the mirror” and “get it sorted”.

The court has heard that the Army had come under severe pressure to mobilise sufficient personnel for the Gulf but, in another letter, Sergeant Major Drain claimed that instructors were allowing people to pass through Chilwell “without checking the basics”.

He eventually instituted his own Mobilisation Risk Report — with a grading of low, medium or high risk — to accompany each soldier approved for service in the Gulf.

One soldier was said to have taken a long time to teach, kept “making silly mistakes” and lacked confidence.

Another was so poor at “zeroing” his rifle that “he could end up in theatre with a weapon that, in effect, is not pointing straight”. The court was told that after a spate of incidents in Iraq involving the accidental firing of weapons, senior officers ordered that remedial weapons training should be carried out in the field. But no action was taken to train Lance Corporal Blaymire’s unit until after the death of Sergeant Nightingale.

The judge has demanded to know who was responsible for the policy at Chilwell and yesterday he told the five-strong military panel, which is trying the case, that he was still waiting for answers. Lance Corporal Blaymire and Sergeant Nightingale were both from Leeds and members of 217 Transport Squadron, part of 150 Regiment (Volunteers) of the Royal LogisticCorps.

The dead man, who worked in electronics, was a grandson of Bill Bowes, the Yorkshire and England cricketer. The hearing continues.

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