Major Campbell: They wanted to prosecute an officer, and my personnel record was tampered with
Credit: David Rose for the Telegraph/David Rose for the Telegraph
Robert Campbell is convinced the Ministry of Defence “wanted an officer” to put on trial for war crimes in Iraq. Over the course of 17 years, he is convinced they picked him.
A lieutenant at the time that Saeed Shabram drowned in the Shatt al-Arab waterway on May 23, 2003, he was a major by the time he quit the Army in disgust, clear that he will tell his one-year-old son he must never follow his footsteps into the military.
But Major Campbell, 47, now believes there was a concerted plot to get him.
Three years ago, after making a request for all personnel files held on him by the Army under the Data Protection Act, he discovered that a fine for £489.31 had been recorded on his official Discipline Record.
The fine doesn’t sound like much – except that its timing was alarming. It was dated for May 24, 2003, a day after Mr Shabram, 19, had died.
Blocking promotion
The sum is significant too. Anything under £400 is removed from files after a year, but anything over that is considered a ‘Regimental Entry’, which can block promotion.
Why it was on Major Campbell’s file is unclear. In an email sent to him on 18 August 2017, the Army admitted it was recorded in error.
“I am writing to inform you that an error on your JPA [Joint Personnel Administration] Discipline Record for a £489.31 fine, dated 24 May 2003, has been removed,” wrote an official in the Army’s Conduct Branch, and “Any reference to that discipline entry is no longer on your file.”
The official, the email went on, had “personally contacted” both the Service Prosecuting Authority and military authorities investigating alleged crimes committed by troops in Iraq dating back to the 2003 invasion.
“I have not been able to ascertain,” said the official, “why this error occurred.”
Major Campbell is sure he knows why.
Records tampered with
“They wanted to prosecute an officer,” said Major Campbell, “And here is my personnel record tampered with. My honours and awards had been deleted from my file and a £489 fine had been added."
"When I questioned it, they just said it was a mistake. I said: ‘how can you accidentally attribute a fine with no offence attributed to it and delete all my medals and awards? My belief is they did this to fabricate a bad character element to justify trying to have me arrested or a search warrant or surveillance.
"It’s part of the assassination of character.”
On the date of the alleged offence, Major Campbell points out he was confined to base in the immediate aftermath of the drowning.
“This was the day after the accident. It was pretty shit,” said Major Campbell, “On the 24 May I wouldn’t have been out and about doing crimes anywhere.”
The role of Ihat
The disciplinary record was available for investigators to examine, including civilians working with the Iraq Historic Allegations Team (Ihat), who had wanted to charge Major Campbell with manslaughter for Shabram’s death.
In 2014, he had been promoted to major, an expert in bomb disposal, wounded in Afghanistan and recipient of medals and honours for gallantry and good conduct.
A year earlier, Ihat secretly began a fresh investigation into him.
Ihat was set up in the wake of allegations of war crimes made by Phil Shiner, a human rights lawyer since struck off for dishonesty, who had brought thousands of alleged crimes, including murder and torture, to public attention.
None of them have led to a prosecution.
‘Wetting’
A fortnight before Shabram died, another teenager Ahmed Jabbar Keeram Ali, aged just 15, had also drowned.
On the face of it the incidents seemed similar and Shiner had claimed that both Iraqis had been victims of ‘wetting’, a policy he claimed of disciplining suspected looters by pushing them into rivers and waterways.
But Baroness Hallett in her report found the deaths unconnected and the circumstances markedly different.
“The first time I heard the term ‘wetting’ was from Phil Shiner,” said Major Campbell, “It is something I believe Phil Shiner made up.”
Major Campbell is reluctant to discuss what happened on the day Shabram died. “It was horrific. I don’t want to go there in my head,” he said, “I’ve tried desperately for years to block it out.”
The latest report exonerates him and his colleagues.
The incident
Shabram fell or jumped into the water and a soldier – identified in the report only as SO72 – jumped in after him. Major Campbell requested backup on the radio and then entered the polluted water as well.
They were in there for 40 minutes trying to find and rescue Shabram, but to no avail.
A mob – misguided and thinking Shabram had been killed by the soldiers – arrived at the dockside.
Major Campbell is adamant his team did their best to save the young man.
"Rather than acting as thugs or criminals, my soldiers were heroic, professional and restrained under attack from the mob," he said.
Under investigation for 17 years
The reward, however, for trying to save the boy’s life was to find himself under investigation (on and off) for the next 17 years. "That is one of the horrors of all this,” he said.
"I am incensed that so much time, resources and effort was put in by the Ministry of Defence to find something that wasn’t there and cast me as a bad character to fit a narrative of ‘something must be done’.”
A year after the drowning, Major Campbell and three other soldiers then under suspicion found they were the only members of the 32 Engineer Regiment to have their Iraq service medals withheld.
More than 700 troops received their medals at that time.
Erased from the regiment
Then, on the day of the regimental photograph taken on base at the garrison in Hohne in Germany, Major Campbell and the three soldiers “were told to go to another camp in Germany on some spurious task”.
Nobody wanted them in the photo.
A First Preliminary Examination (FPE) in 2006 cleared Major Campbell and the others of any wrongdoing and concluded witnesses had colluded and lied over what they had seen.
Robert Campbell’s military career was back on track and he was promoted to acting major in 2012 and then major in 2014.
He served five tours of Afghanistan and was seriously injured in 2010, caught in a firefight and forced to jump for his life from a two-storey building.
But behind the scenes Ihat was after him.
A chance call
Major Campbell only discovered he was under investigation when an ex-girlfriend telephoned him to tell him police had been to see her and ask her about the incident 11 years before.
In fact they were not ‘coppers’ as she had called them but civilian investigators with Ihat.
They had wanted to know if he had ever been violent towards her, had secretly confessed to drowning anyone or even was racist.
The ex-girlfriend had remained on good terms, and appalled at the line of questioning, immediately phoned him. Major Campbell’s new partner, now his wife, remembers the immediate toll it took.
"They have literally tortured him psychologically. I have had to watch him suffer physically and mentally. It put our life on hold,” she said, declining to be named for this article.
“It has impacted both our lives. There have been days he couldn’t get out of bed because he is so mentally distressed. There are days when I have to hold the fort and that wouldn’t have been the case if it wasn’t for that phone call from his ex-girlfriend telling him he was back under investigation in december 2014.”
PTSD and despression
Major Campbell suffers PTSD, severe depression and walks with the aid of a stick due to his physical injuries. His hearing is shot to pieces too.
“It got to the point that as so many versions of events were being thrown at me by Ihat, the Royal Military Police, and the Service Prosecution Authority, I could no longer tell what was real and what was fiction. My memories were being fragmented and altered and my brain could no longer make sense of it, so I blocked it all out,” he said.
He was in the military’s rehabilitation centre at Headley Court when he first realised a parliamentary committee was investigating the treatment of troops under the chairmanship of Johnny Mercer, then a backbench MP now the Armed Forces veterans minister.
Johnny Mercer’s influence
"If it were not for Johnny Mercer, I would be dead today. He filled the Army-shaped void that was absent for 17 years in holding the MoD to account for this. The Army just did not care about us."
Major Campbell was asked to give evidence to the MPs’ inquiry in 2017 but the military refused him permission following an intervention from Michael Fallon, the then defence secretary.
He has a son now and is trying to adjust to civilian life in a market town somewhere in Middle England.
“I would never advise my son to go in the Army,” he said. “We are in a situation where anybody can accuse you of anything and no matter how absurd it is, nobody is going to help you.”
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