As British Airways Flight 149 refuelled on the runway of Kuwait International Airport, steward Charlie Kristianson slipped into routine – checking the catering, handing blankets to sleepy passengers, making tea for the crew.
It was while he was packing some kit into an overhead locker that an unimaginable terror was unleashed.
Without warning, the mighty carcass of the jumbo shook so violently Mr Kristianson struggled to steady himself.
There was a deafening roar as two fighter jets appeared from nowhere, screeching overhead; shockwaves reverberated through the plane as explosions ripped the ground below.
Passengers screamed in panic and utter disbelief – Iraqi jets were bombing the runway.
Horrific scenes: The aircraft was destroyed on the Kuwait runway
Across the PA, the alarmed captain shouted the order: ‘Emergency! Evacuate! Evacuate!’
The crew struggled to control the stampede of terrified passengers as they headed frantically to the exits.
At any moment, the fully fuelled aircraft could be consumed in a massive ball of fire.
The crew shepherded the terrified passengers into the terminal and through its large glass windows, the full horror of the attack was being played out.
A stewardess sidled up to Mr Kristianson as they watched the drama unfold. ‘We are in a war,’ she said. Iraq had invaded Kuwait.
After a headcount of the passengers, the crew ushered them onto buses driven by evacuating Kuwaiti ground staff.
The Iraqis were rounding up foreigners and heavily armed soldiers were waiting for the Flight 149 contingent when the buses pulled up at the nearby airport hotel.
The soldiers told them they would be taken to Kuwait City’s Regency Palace Hotel to be ‘guests of Iraq’.
As they were being bussed to the Regency, Mr Kristianson could see the destruction of Kuwait laid bare; corpses and burned-out cars strewn across roads; holes gouged out of buildings by mortars.
One passenger saw a pregnant Kuwaiti woman being bayoneted in the street by an Iraqi soldier.
Mr Kristianson, from Uddingston, Lanarkshire, was one of 385 passengers and crew taken hostage after Flight 149 landed in Kuwait, an hour into the Iraqi invasion on August 2, 1990.
The hostages, including 11 children, were deployed as ‘human shields’ at strategic military installations.
They were starved, beaten, sexually assaulted and mentally tortured by their Iraqi captors.
Most sickening of all, it was a suffering that they need never have endured.
Now 95 of the human shields, including Mr Kristianson, are suing the British Government and BA, claiming Flight 149 was deliberately sent into a warzone to deploy a covert special operations team it was carrying.
It was 4.13am Kuwaiti time, when the flight from London touched down for its refuelling stop en route to Malaysia.
Yet at 3am Kuwaiti time, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s foreign policy adviser had phoned her to tell her that Saddam Hussein had invaded.
The claimants say the government and BA knew Iraqi forces were massing on the border while the flight was in the air, but instead of warning it to divert, innocent civilians were recklessly delivered into the clutches of a brutal dictator.
Key evidence has come from investigative journalist Steve Davis, whose best-selling book The Secret History of Flight 149 points conclusively to a military intelligence team being onboard.
The team known as the Increment are so elite and elusive their mere existence is denied by the British Government.
Mr Davis worked on a documentary with Sky which he hopes will heap pressure on the Government and BA to reveal the truth.
The writer has called the scandal ‘the biggest cover-up in British history in the last 30 years’.
He said: ‘The legal action is not about money, it is about the human shields from the flight being given the apology and the truth they deserve.’
Matthew Jury, from the law firm behind the claim, McCue Jury and Partners, has called the treatment of the claimants a ‘shameful stain on the UK’s conscience’.
Mr Kristianson’s 132 days in captivity left him so broken at times he prayed for death.
He was raped, beaten and became so ill and emaciated he feared he would ‘just fade away’.
‘The suffering was unbearable, and it was all avoidable,’ he said. ‘I was betrayed by my government and I will never forgive them. I am furious. This legal case is vital to hold BA and the government accountable.’
Despite the horrors they had witnessed as they were bussed through Kuwait, the passengers and crew still clung to the belief they would be evacuated as soon as there was a pocket of calm.
Mr Kristianson said: ‘We believed the world-renowned reputation of British Airways and the British Government would ensure both our protection and safe passage. We were so naive.’
Traumatic ordeal: Charlie Kristianson in tracksuit with fellow hostages and BA chief Colin Marshall after being freed
When they were first taken, the hostages were treated reasonably well. Their time at the Regency Hotel was a period they would come to view later as one of relative ease.
Though the distressing cacophony of war continued across Kuwait City, inside the hotel was a bubble: reasonable food and adequate sleeping; games organised for the children by the crew.
But reality began to dawn after visits from senior BA management and British embassy staff offered no greater hope than to sit tight and be patient.
Mr Kristianson, who was then 28, said: ‘There was nothing done. They offered us no help at all. We realised we were on our own.’
Selected nationalities, including Malaysians, Indians and Irish were picked off for freedom, but as talk of war rose, it was clear the Americans and British were not to be ‘guests’ but hostages.
On August 18, those who remained from Flight 149 were told to gather in the reception of the hotel, where they were divided into groups. They discovered they were to be deployed as human shields.
Mr Kristianson, seven other men and four stewardesses were taken to Shuwaikh Port in Kuwait City where, to their horror, they were introduced to their new quarters – a looted bungalow, covered in excrement and infested with flies.
Mr Kristianson said: ‘It was traumatising. The soldiers were shouting and leering at the women, who were so scared they would be raped.’
They had cause to be fearful after they had learned an Iraqi soldier had raped a stewardess on a bus following the evacuation from the plane. He was summarily executed by a commander.
At the bungalow, the process of dehumanising the hostages had begun and they were told that if they tried to leave the bungalow, they would be shot.
Mr Kristianson said: ‘We were treated like dirt. We had to clean the bungalow, which was disgusting. We tried to make it habitable and it became our de facto prison for the next two months.’
In their forced confinement and in suffocating heat, tensions mounted and cliques formed.
Human shield: Charlie Kristianson in BA uniform
The human shields fought over food as the rations grew increasingly meagre and Mr Kristianson, who at 6ft 5in had already been thin, became dangerously malnourished. His weight plummeted to only 6.5st.
In desperation for food, a hostage persuaded a friendlier guard to source some more rations and they were shocked to find the leg of a giraffe on the doorstep the next day. It had been shot at the zoo by Iraqis. Mr Kristianson refused to eat it but others did.
After contracting hepatitis from contaminated water, Mr Kristianson became steadily weaker and mentally defeated.
He said: ‘We were locked in this landscape that was so dry and hostile, the heat and the earth looked like it would consume us and we would dry up into nothing. It felt hopeless.’
Worse was to come. When Mr Kristianson developed severe toothache, an Iraqi officer offered to drive him to a dentist.
But on the way back, he took a circuitous route and pulled up outside a tower installation and at gunpoint forced Mr Kristianson to climb inside it to the third floor. It was there that he raped him.
When it was over, Mr Kristianson was hysterical and he jumped from an open window, not caring if the fall killed him.
But he landed on some discarded mattresses below and, distraught and bruised, his attacker dragged him to the car.
He snarled at Mr Kristianson: ‘Your country raped Iraq and now I have raped you.’
The violation left him broken and he spent his days withdrawing into sleep. At night he read books left behind by the Sudanese professor and his family, who had lived in the bungalow.
A month into their capture, Saddam bowed under international pressure and agreed to release the female human shields and the children.
For couples and families, it was a devastating dilemma, to go or to stay with the men they loved.
But the four stewardesses faced no such conflict, though they inevitably felt guilt. They had an emotional last meal with the men in the bungalow and secreted letters they promised to deliver to loved ones back home.
After the women left, the men were allowed out to exercise and one day they saw that eight ditches had been dug near the bungalow.
Clive Earthy, a hostage who had been the cabin supervisor on the flight, was told by a soldier that if the allies invaded, they had orders to shoot the men and bury them in the ditches.
Mr Kristianson said: ‘Clive was weeping and in a terrible state after that. We all were. I thought I was going to be buried in an unmarked grave and my mother would never know where I was.
‘We felt like cattle, just waiting to be slaughtered. We just had to manage our sanity in the interim.’
To do that, Mr Kristianson relied on his closest companion in the bungalow – a loud, macho Northern Irishman called Mike who had promised he would protect him from any further violation.
For their sanity, he set them both the task of collecting up the treasured keepsakes left behind by the professor, Osman El-Dusouqui, his wife and children.
It became their raison d’être to find the family one day and return the possessions.
Mr Kristianson said: ‘We had come to know the family through their keepsakes and photographs and it kept us going to think that one day we would make sure they got them back.’
After two months the men were told they were leaving the bungalow and it was a far greater wrench than they could have predicted.
Mr Kristianson said: ‘We had made it clean and liveable. We had roots in that place.’ When he wept, Mike told him ‘At least we are not in those ditches’.
It was late November when they were moved to Baghdad and devastatingly, they were separated, with Mr Kristianson billeted in a missile base close to the city.
He was surprised to find he would be sharing with six Scottish air force pilots who had been captured by the Iraqis.
The military men were treated so much worse than Mr Kristianson and were regularly taken out to be tortured and beaten.
He said: ‘They were kind, brave men. They would come back to the base, injured and bruised. It was inhumane.’
Not long into his captivity at the base, Mr Kristianson was visited by a kind doctor called Faisal, who was so alarmed by his condition he persuaded the guards to allow him to be taken to hospital.
It was there that the doctor arranged for Mr Kristianson to call his mother Betty back home in Bothwell, Lanarkshire.
Faisal took him to buy clothes, to eat with his family and he promised him that one day he would get out. Mr Kristianson did not believe him.
But after months of negotiations with Saddam by politicians and dignitaries, including former prime minister Edward Heath, word came that the human shields were at last to be freed.
It was an overjoyed Faisal who delivered the news to Mr Kristianson that, after almost five months in captivity, he was going home.
He said: ‘I was still unwell and it was hard to take it in. I don’t think I believed it was happening until we were in a plane heading to the UK.’
When they landed at Gatwick in December, Betty was there with the other families and she threw her arms around her son, shocked at how weak and thin he was.
Mr Kristianson was glad to be freed but even in the comfort of the home he had left in Uddingston, he struggled to feel safe.
He carried on working for BA but left after 13 years as information emerged about Flight 149.
Disgusted by what he saw as a betrayal by his country, Mr Kristianson renounced his British citizenship and now lives in Luxembourg, where he teaches English.
He said: ‘I want the world to know how we were all betrayed. It left me no longer feeling safe in Britain and I lost all trust in its government. I am grateful to have rebuilt my life elsewhere. I can’t forgive what happened to us and my greatest hope is that the truth will come out.’
There was one happy ending. Mr Kristianson traced the professor and fulfilled the promise to return his family’s keepsakes.
He found him in Vienna and flew to meet him and hand over the treasures he had so lovingly saved.
Mr Kristianson said: ‘Collecting those items meant the world to me and Mike. It kept me sane. I didn’t believe I would get a chance to return them. I am glad I survived and could keep my word.’
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