Exclusive: Hermer pursued British troops with war crime lies

Attorney General dismissed warnings that Iraqi claims of murder were false as he worked on case against soldiers Daily Telegraph 22/04/26 Lord Hermer pursued a notorious “witch hunt” against British troops despite being warned that the allegations were lies, The Telegraph can disclose.

An investigation by this newspaper can reveal the Attorney General’s leading role in the Al-Sweady scandal, which left decorated war heroes facing false accusations of murder and torture for more than a decade. Emails and legal documents show that Sir Keir Starmer’s closest Cabinet ally acted as lead counsel in civil claims against the Ministry of Defence (MoD) and pressed for lucrative compensation despite mounting evidence that his eight Iraqi clients were “on the make”. The Attorney General later insisted that it made no difference whether his clients were “a saint or a member of al-Qaeda” while suing British troops under human rights laws. One leading lawyer has now called for Lord Hermer to face a misconduct investigation over his part in the scandal, while a former head of the Army said his role was tantamount to “treason”. The compensation case centred on claims brought by Iraqis who alleged that British troops had tortured and executed civilians after the Battle of Danny Boy in southern Iraq in 2004. But after years of investigations, the £31m Al-Sweady public inquiry ruled that the allegations were “deliberate lies” driven by “ingrained hostility” towards the British Army. Lord Hermer’s clients had claimed to be innocent farmers and labourers, but they were instead revealed to be members of the Mahdi Army – an Islamist insurgent group backed by Iran’s hardline Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The British troops were fully exonerated in 2014, and the scandal led to disciplinary investigations into a number of human rights lawyers, including the disgraced solicitor Phil Shiner, who was struck off and later convicted of fraud. The Telegraph has obtained more than 25,000 pages of documents revealing Lord Hermer’s involvement in the case for nearly a decade. Working closely alongside Shiner and leading human rights solicitor Martyn Day, Lord Hermer attempted to secure taxpayer-funded settlements before the Iraqis’ lies could be exposed at the Al-Sweady inquiry. By then, he had already been warned that his clients could be exposed as “on the make” and that their allegations were “nonsense”. Other internal emails show Lord Hermer, then a senior barrister in private practice, advising on how Shiner could “get the big story out there” and “generate sufficient interest” while admitting there needed to be “wriggle room if the killings did not in fact happen”.