IRAQ: Three British soldiers convicted of mistreating captured looters in Iraq were expelled from the army and jailed yesterday after a trial over prisoner abuse that drew comparison with the Abu Ghraib scandal.
"When you abused the power that you had over them as you did, you cannot expect very much leniency," Judge Advocate Michael Hunter told the men.
Cpl Daniel Kenyon was sentenced to 18 months in prison for aiding and abetting another soldier in an assault on a detainee and for failing to report other incidents, including one in which two Iraqi men were forced to simulate oral sex.
Lance Cpl Mark Cooley was sentenced to two years for posing for a photograph which shows him apparently about to punch a man and for suspending a trussed-up prisoner on the arms of a forklift truck.
Lance Cpl Darren Larkin, who pleaded guilty at the beginning of the trial, was sentenced to five months in prison for assault after he was photographed in his boxer shorts standing on a man tied up on the ground.
All three were dismissed from the army with disgrace.
The abuses, which came to light only by accident when a soldier took a film into a photo shop to be developed, have raised concern that similar offences by British soldiers may have been more widespread than was once thought possible.
Defence lawyers claimed the three were made scapegoats for failures by their commanders, who they said had ordered looters to be rounded up, beaten and abused in an operation that broke Geneva Convention rules on treating detainees.