British Airways BA149 took off from London on 1 August 1990. It was a warm clear night in the British capital. That summer the three tenors had soared over the radio waves and Martina Navratilova had won a record ninth Wimbledon singles title. It was also the summer of the invasion of Kuwait.
Flight BA149 was on its way to Kuala Lumpur and scheduled to make a refuelling stop in Kuwait in the early hours of the morning of 2 August. Iraqi forces, as we know now, had already crossed the border. The plane landed but did not leave again as scheduled; instead its crew and passengers were taken hostage for five months and used by Saddam Hussein’s forces as a human shield.
@marklanebiz#OnThisDay 1990.
— Lord Flash ☕🎖️ (@EatKnuckleFritz) August 2, 2017
BA149 lands in Kuwait hours after Iraq had invaded the country.
Lots of controversy about this event.
Go read👍 pic.twitter.com/9w7COS6f3X
Now a group of survivors of the ordeal of flight BA149 are taking legal action against the UK government who, it’s alleged, not only knew about the imminent invasion and failed to warn against passenger flights to the warzone but took advantage of the flight to install secret forces in the region.
Lawyers from McCue Jury and Partners are representing around fifty of the 367 on board that night, whose months-long captivity in Iraq is said in court records to have included physical abuse, starvation, mock executions and sexual assault, leaving many scarred with PTSD. The firm estimates each survivor could receive damages of £170,000 ($213,020).
The UK has already apologised and acknowledged in 2021 that Britain’s ambassador to Kuwait, had informed the Foreign Office around midnight that Iraqi troops had crossed the border. But that information, the government claims, was not passed on to British Airways. The passengers’ lawsuit says otherwise.
Barry Manners, one of the passengers, told The National he saw “a group of between ‘half a dozen and a dozen’ men, who ‘looked super fit and super lean’, board the plane.”
“Call it what you like, black ops or whatever, but there were soldiers on the flight,” the 57-year-old businessman insisted. This claim has been made by others, including in the book Operation Trojan Horseby Stephen Davies.
Mr Manners, who is now a local councillor, described experiencing psychological problems after his repatriation and is “still angry” about flight BA149.
We were not treated as citizens but as expendable pawns for commercial and political gain.
Barry Manners, one of the passengers
McCue Jury and Partners’ Matthew Jury said: “The lives and safety of innocent civilians were sacrificed by the British government and British Airways for the sake of an off-the-books military operation.
“Both have concealed and denied the truth for more than 30 years. The victims and survivors of flight BA149 deserve justice for being treated as disposable collateral.”
