THE commander in charge of six Royal Military Police soldiers who were killed by an Iraqi mob admitted yesterday that they lacked the manpower to carry out their duties in an area described as a powder keg.

Colonel Thomas Beckett, former commanding officer of 1 Para Battle Group in Iraq, told an inquest that only a handful of Red Caps had been deployed to train several thousand Iraqi police in the months after the invasion.

The six Red Caps of 156 Provost Company Royal Military Police died in a hail of bullets in June 2003 after becoming caught up in a demonstration outside the police station they were visiting in the town of al-Majar al-Kabir, in Maysan province.

The incident provoked one of the biggest controversies of the war. A patrol from the 1st Battalion The Parachute Regiment was at one end of the town on the same day that the Red Caps were killed but was unaware of their presence and was unable to rescue them from a mob of 500.

At the reconvened inquest at Oxford Coroner’s Court into their deaths, Colonel Beckett admitted that there were not enough members of the Royal Military Police to deal with the tasks they were given. “I would have preferred more,” he said. “I was told I was going to get two teams of RMPs but it was reduced to one.”

Colonel Beckett’s battle group was in charge of Maysan after the war phase of Operation Telic ended on May 1, 2003, and the Red Caps were part of his force despite the pressures they were under in the aftermath of the invasion. Colonel Beckett said that he had only one platoon of 25 Red Caps. In al-Amarah, the capital of Maysan, he had seven Red Caps for 1,100 Iraqi police.

But he denied a suggestion from John Mackenzie, a solicitor representing five of the families of the victims, that the Red Caps visiting al-Majar al-Kabir on June 24, 2003, were being sent into “a powder keg”. He described Maysan at that time as “benign but fragile”.

Colonel Beckett said that before June 24 there had been no targeting of British troops in Maysan. He said that the 1,000 soldiers under his command had been involved in a comprehensive attempt to rid the province of a huge number of weapons. A two-week amnesty had been declared, to little effect, after which he focused his efforts on trying to find heavy weapons.

As an illustration of how Maysan was historically an armed society, Colonel Beckett said that local tribes used to throw hand grenades into the river to catch fish, and if rival tribes tried to scoop up the fish from opposite banks, it would often lead to a gunfight. On one occasion, he said, seven Iraqis died. He admitted that the “incident in al-Majar alKabir would never have happened if the community had not been so well armed”.

A board of inquiry report into the death of the Red Caps — Sergeant Simon Hamilton-Jewell, 41; Corporals Russell Aston, 30, Paul Long, 24, and Simon Miller, 21; and Lance Corporals Benjamin Hyde, 23, and Thomas Keys, 20 — said that they entered al-Majar al-Kabir when there had been a number of arms searches by 1 Para. It was suggested that this had caused community anger.

Mr Mackenzie said outside the inquest that he had written to Nicholas Gardiner, the Oxford coroner, asking for Geoff Hoon, the former Defence Secretary, and Major-General Peter Wall, the commander of 1st UK Armoured Division in Iraq at the time of the Red Caps’ deaths, to appear as witnesses. “But the coroner ruled it out as inappropriate,” Mr Mackenzie said. Reg Keys, father of Lance Corporal Thomas Keys, said he did not expect that the Iraqis responsible for the Red Caps’ deaths would ever be prosecuted. The inquest continues today.

• A young soldier died in a roadside bomb explosion in Iraq when equipment capable of detecting the devices had been stored in a nearby warehouse for two weeks, a board of inquiry report has revealed. Fusilier Gordon Gentle, 19, of the 1st Battalion Royal Highland Fusiliers was killed on June 28, 2004, when the armoured Land Rover in which he was travelling was blown up by an improvised explosive device. Rose Gentle, Fusilier Gentle’s mother, said: “If they had fitted this jamming device my son would still be alive today.”

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