MoD accused of covering up casualty rates

By Sean Rayment
Telegraph
Aug. 20, 2006

Defence chiefs have been accused of covering up the number of soldiers injured while fighting Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan.

Senior officers have revealed that up to 40 soldiers may have been injured in a series of bitter battles with militants in the southern province of Helmand since the arrival in May of the 3,600 strong British task force. Many have life-threatening injuries and are being treated in hospitals in Britain.

Despite the growing casualty rate, however, the Ministry of Defence has no figures for combat injuries on its website - despite promises by John Reid, the former defence secretary, earlier this year that details would be made public.

The MoD's website, which is supposed to update casualty figures every month, reports fatalities but states that no figures for combat injuries are currently available. No reason is given.

MPs and senior officers have accused the Government of trying to "cover-up" the sacrifices being made by the British troops in Afghanistan, and one senior officer claimed that the MoD's policy of not releasing full details of injured soldiers was for "purely presentational reasons" because of the negative messages it would send to the public.

The officer added that there was a great deal of "bad feeling" within the military over the treatment of casualties, many of whom believe they have become the forgotten victims of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

One of the injured soldiers, a ranger in the Royal Irish Regiment, was shot through the head by a sniper 10 days ago and is fighting for his life in a Karachi hospital. Two weeks earlier, two members of the Parachute Regiment were seriously injured in an ambush during which one soldier was shot in the stomach and another received severe shrapnel injuries to his leg.

In June, three soldiers received gunshot and shrapnel wounds in an ambush that left one officer, Captain Jim Philippson, dead. This newspaper has been given details of several other soldiers injured in battles with the Taliban.

Liam Fox, the shadow defence secretary, told The Sunday Telegraph that the MoD's policy smacked of political motives.

He said: "Ministers have given us assurances in the past that they will make casualty figures and details of casualties available… any attempt to suppress information of this sort will only serve to undermine public confidence in what's happening in Afghanistan and that would be a tragedy."

A spokesman for the MoD said last night: "There is no attempt to cover up casualty figures. It is our intention to publish casualty figures for Afghanistan in the near future."