MoD faces questions after Libyan cadets are sent home

Photo / Mohammed El-Sheikhy

The Ministry of Defence was last night facing demands to explain the unravelling of a training programme for Libyan armed forces which has led to 300 soldiers being sent home early amid allegations of sex attacks and ill discipline.

Army chiefs yesterday cut short the six-month programme for some 325 Libyan troops based at a barracks in Bassingbourn, Cambridgeshire, after admitting there had been "disciplinary issues" over the conduct of some of the soldiers sent to Britain as part of a pledge to help the Tripoli government improve its security.

The decision follows the charging of five of the Libyan military personnel with a spate of sex attacks in Cambridge, including the rape of a 20-year-old man 10 days ago.

Two men have pleaded guilty to a separate sexual assault which, a court heard, involved them stealing bikes to cycle 16 miles from the barracks into the university city before indecently assaulting women in the centre by groping them and trying to put their hands up their skirts.

Andrew Lansley, the former Conservative Health Secretary and MP for South Cambridgeshire, said that the MoD had to answer to its apparent failure to put the resources in place to enforce a rule that the Libyans could not leave their base without an escort.

He told BBC Radio Cambridgeshire: "Unfortunately, [the MoD] appeared to be incapable of ensuring that a minority didn't undermine the whole training programme."

The cohort of Libyan troops, many of them former members of the militias which deposed the dictator Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, was the first of a total of 2,000 who had been expected to pass through Bassingbourn as part of a programme to regularise the country's security forces.

The MoD insisted yesterday that the majority of the recruits, who were escorted by a small number of Libyan officers and were being trained by the Royal Regiment of Scotland, had benefited from the programme. But the project had been beset by problems, including an incident where troops were detained for trying to visit a local supermarket.

In a statement, the MoD said: "The majority of recruits have responded positively to the training despite the ongoing political uncertainty in Libya but there have been disciplinary issues."