LONDON - A senior RAF officer was placed in charge of mercenaries who used helicopter gunships to shoot up villages in Sierra Leone, the British Ministry of Defence admitted yesterday.
The freelance soldiers have killed large numbers of civilians, human rights campaigners say, and have been filmed firing indiscriminately with rockets and machine guns at a village where rebels from the Revolutionary United Front were believed to be holed up.
The revelation will prove deeply embarrassing for Foreign Secretary Robin Cook as he awaits news of six British soldiers being held hostage in the troubled West African state.
Last night 150 soldiers from the Parachute Regiment were on standby in Senegal, ready to take military action if necessary to rescue the men.
The revelation will also rekindle a row over British links two years ago with some of the same mercenaries.
Cook said then that British forces would never cooperate with mercenaries, and that their presence in Sierra Leone was "a menace."
"We are not aware of any British mercenary involvement in the current conflict, but we shall obviously try to ensure that any such activity is within the bounds set by United Nations resolutions," he said last year.
The mercenaries' activity has breached United Nations resolutions calling for the withdrawal of all private military operators from the troubled West African state.
The British squadron leader, who has not been named, was spotted by a film crew from the Australian Broadcasting Company at a barracks in Sierra Leone's capital, Freetown.
The Ministry of Defence confirmed his presence, apparently believing wrongly that he had been caught on film.
The officer was giving orders in the operations room of a former South African soldier, Neall Ellis, who flies two helicopter gunships paid for by "the international community" - believed to be a euphemism for diamond-mining interests.
Ellis previously flew a helicopter for Sandline International, the mercenary company that broke a UN embargo when it shipped weapons to Sierra Leone in 1998.
Before that, he worked for Executive Outcomes, another mercenary company which shares offices in Britain with Sandline and a group of mineral companies.
Ellis told the ABC journalists: "He [the RAF officer] is here as an adviser, but he is basically running the place."
Yesterday, a ministry spokeswoman accepted Ellis' account, but said the officer was co-ordinating the RAF's own operations with Ellis' work rather than directing his shooting raids.
Asked if the officer was in charge of the operations room, she said: "That is possibly very true. He would be there as an adviser but presumably he would be in more authority than Neall Ellis.
"We are working with the Sierra Leone Government. If they use private military companies, that is up to them. We would be fools if we didn't talk to them."
The officer was in Sierra Leone with Operation Palliser, a mission to secure Freetown's Lunghi airport and to train the country's army to fight rebel soldiers.
Mark Corcoran, an ABC reporter-producer, went on a mission with Ellis and his crew.
He filmed them shooting up a burning village which had been overrun by rebels from the Revolutionary United Front.
The pilot was recorded discussing a group of men who could be seen below.
"I'm not sure if they are civilians or not - there are not supposed to be any civilians here - it's all supposed to be a rebel area," he said before his men opened fire.
- INDEPENDENT
AdvertisementAdvertise with NZME.