A man who was among British Airways passengers and crew taken hostage in Kuwait and used as human shields during Saddam Hussein’s invasion, who are suing the airline, said his ordeal was made worse by its staff’s homophobia.
On Friday, more than 100 claimants served legal papers on BA and the government, who they say both knew the invasion had taken place hours before flight BA149 landed in Kuwait in 1990.
Barry Manners, then 24, said the attitude of BA staff, who took charge at the hotel where people were held, changed when they discovered that his partner, Anthony Yong, had Aids after he requested medication.
He said they told them to stay in the room to avoid contaminating others and talked about transferring Yong to the local infectious disease hospital, despite the risk this would pose to him with his compromised immune system.
“They dropped a litre of disinfectant outside the room for us to disinfect the room, and food was brought up,” said the 58-year-old. “We had strict instructions that when they would knock on the door three times or something, a tray of food would be left. We then had to wait five minutes so that they could clear the corridor.
“Do you know [the TV Aids drama] It’s a Sin? I think it’s set in 1983-84, and those were the sorts of attitudes that you’d expected then, of people being isolated and chained to beds and God knows what.
“Well, that’s where we were, but seven years later, at the behest of an organisation that had had dozens, at least, of their own personnel who’d actually become ill with that very disease. I was just astonished that these attitudes existed – it was like being back in the middle ages.”
He said that after about 10 days in the hotel, BA’s sales manager phoned saying they were being moved to the local hospital, and BA crew, along with hotel management, lined up to evict them.
But they refused to go and barricaded the door using furniture. After a standoff lasting a couple of days, BA and the hotel relented, but instead made them move to a prefabricated building in the hotel grounds, he said.
“We were basically expelled from the hotel,” said Manners, a district councillor in Kent. “But we’re then near the beach, in a war zone. We’re about 50 to 80 metres back from the shoreline. There’s anti-aircraft type, heavy-calibre machine-guns lined up along the coast that were firing off at night, so you just feel you’ve got ordnance going off almost next door.
“Conscript soldiers would come round scrounging for food, which was obviously very disconcerting because we’re vulnerable and you’ve got people with Kalashnikovs wandering around looking through your kitchen to see what food they can take.”
He said that after a couple of weeks being confined there, Yong, whose family they had been on their way to visit in Malaysia, managed to get temporary Indian travel documents by handing over cash, and so he was taken out of the country overland posing as an Indian citizen.
Meanwhile, Manners was taken to Baghdad where he spent about three months as a human shield at a hydroelectric plant where he was told he was “to be executed if the Americans invaded”.
When he was released and met Yong back in England, he said his partner “was an absolute mess, he looked like he’d just been liberated from Belsen [concentration camp]. I was really shocked at his deterioration.”
Yong died about 15 months later, having never received so much as a call from BA to check how he was, Manners said.
“I‘m still angry,” said Manners. “The way we were treated was … particularly cruel and unnecessary. It was ignorance. It almost certainly hastened his demise.”
In 2021, the then foreign secretary, Liz Truss, admitted the government had covered up the fact that the British ambassador in Kuwait had warned the Foreign Office that the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait was under way before flight BA149 landed. But she said the warning had not been passed on to BA.
Matthew Jury, McCue Jury & Partners LLP, who is representing the claimants, said: “It is never excusable for a government to use citizens as pawns in a military operation. It’s equally shocking that one of the UK’s flagship companies could be complicit in the same.”
A BA spokesperson said on Friday: “Our hearts go out to all those caught up in this shocking act of war 34 years ago, who had to endure a truly horrendous experience.
“UK government records released in 2021 confirmed British Airways was not warned about the invasion.”
