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BA Flight 149

I regularly met quite senior members of the Government, the royal family and people at all levels of Kuwaiti society who lost family and friends during that period. No one on behalf of the Government is in any way going to underestimate the appalling treatment of people from this country and from Kuwait at the hands of what was a brutal and appalling regime. There is simply no doubt about that and I am not going to enter into a debate with the hon. Gentleman about it. I hope that he will accept from me that the Government take those matters every bit as seriously as he does. The real issue—and the real challenge that the hon. Gentleman makes—relates to how all that came about. His suggestion is that there was a deliberate effort to take advantage of this flight in order to place Government operatives in this position for whatever reason—if I may paraphrase what he described—knowing that in all likelihood the passengers on the plane would effectively be taken prisoner. I am not going to go through the various allegations, not least because the hon. Gentleman has indicated that he has further evidence to substantiate them. I am perfectly willing to look further into that, but I want to repeat what he fairly set out as the then Government’s position. He quoted the then Prime Minister’s statement of 6 September 1990. I apologise for repeating it, but it is important to set out the then Government’s view fairly. She said:"““The British Airways flight landed, its passengers disembarked, and the crew handed over to a successor crew and went to their hotels. All that took place before the invasion: the invasion was later””—[Official Report, 6 September 1990; Vol. 177, c. 739.]." The Government were satisfied that there was no negligence or oversight on their part. As the hon. Gentleman has quite properly set out, in both 1992 and 1993, the then Prime Minister, now Sir John Major, replied to letters on this particular issue from my right hon. Friend the Deputy Prime Minister. The letters emphasised that those serving British military personnel were on board the flight. Again, the Government of the day were satisfied that there was no negligence or oversight on their part. I have studied some of the material that the hon. Gentleman relies on. I have read at least two newspaper or magazine publications about these allegations. I hope that he will accept from me that nothing that I have heard today—so far, at any rate—has taken the matter much further forward. He will understand, I hope, the point I made about the identities of the people involved. I praise him for his responsibility in not naming the individuals publicly, but he will understand that I have means of verifying whether these people are, in fact, who they say they are.