Investigating Organised Crime and War Crimes

A Personal Account of a Senior Detective in Kosovo, Iraq and Beyond

Anthony Nott

• Editorial: Pen & Sword Military
• Año: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781473898936
• Categoría: Geschichte
• Categoría: Militärische Biographien

A British detective recounts his years of service abroad, investigating murder, corruption, and human trafficking amid the chaos of war. In 2000, Dorset police detective Tony Nott led the British forensic team on exhumations in Kosovo, unearthing the horrific brutality carried out by Serb paramilitaries. He then worked in Bosnia for the UN, where he led a small team combating human trafficking. Between 2004 and 2005, he served in Iraq, where he witnessed the Shia takeover of the police and encountered unsettling human rights abuses. In this bracing memoir, Nott recounts all of these experiences and more. Nott was involved in the investigation into the murder of British aid worker Margaret Hassan, and is deeply critical of the role played by the UK government. He describes butting heads with senior members of the Iraqi Police, including one who declined to reopen a murder case in which local police were suspected. Nott also describes his two years of service in Israel and Palestine, where he worked with a US-led team to reform the Palestinian security services in cooperation with a European effort. Whilst this book covers the worst of human behavior, it also highlights the bravery and triumph of the ordinary people who were caught up in these events.

Chapter One

The Ups and Downs of a Detective’s Life

In February 1999 I was a detective superintendent in the Dorset Police based at the force headquarters which are located in the centre of the county at Winfrith. This is a very rural location and was a long way from the buzz and excitement of Weymouth, Bournemouth and Poole where I had built my career in the CID. I had twenty-five successful homicide investigations under my belt, I had investigated over a hundred suspicious deaths or suicides and my office wall was covered in certificates of commendation from chief constables and various judges. Together with another detective superintendent, I was responsible for all homicide enquiries, major sensitive investigations and the tricky business of managing informants. Life was good, indeed life was very good – then the phone rang.

The caller introduced himself as a senior investigator with the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC). I was asked if I was involved in the case of Russell Causley, who was convicted of murder at Winchester Crown Court in December of 1996.

With a lump in my throat I said, ‘Yes.’

I was told that doubts had arisen over the evidence given by one or two prosecution witnesses at the original trial which may have led to a miscarriage of justice. These were serving prisoners to whom Causley had made admissions regarding his wife’s killing while he was in prison awaiting trial for a life insurance fraud. I was asked to preserve all material in the case, including court exhibits and police officers’ note books which would then be seized by senior police officers from another force. An independent enquiry would then take place by this new team into the conduct of the Dorset Police and the trial. I had been closely involved in scrutinising the evidence given by these convicted prisoners and if I had failed to test the reliability of their accounts with due diligence then there would be only one person to blame and that was me.

I had become involved in the investigation into Russell Causley when I was the detective chief inspector in Bournemouth during the spring of 1994. It had started out by accident when a detective sergeant from the States of Guernsey Police had come to Bournemouth looking for Causley, who he suspected of a life insurance fraud. He mentioned, almost as an aside, that the suspect had reported his wife as a missing person from the matrimonial home in Bournemouth some eight years earlier. I assigned two of my best detectives to have a look at the missing person report to establish that everything was all right. It turned out that it was anything but all right and over the next two years we were able to put together a case, so convincing that Causley was convicted of his wife’s murder by the unanimous verdict of the jury in December 1996. His wife’s body was never recovered and when I subsequently went to visit him in prison to ask him what he had done with her he refused to speak to me. Nothing more was heard of the matter until I received the phone call from the CCRC.

With some trepidation I went to see the Deputy Chief Constable, George Pothecary, a pragmatic and hard-nosed policeman who worked in an office one floor beneath mine. As I went through the details of the telephone call, I could see the concern start to grow on his face. The CCRC were established in the 1980s to investigate potential miscarriages of justice following a series of wrongful convictions in that decade. If the CCRC are involved in poking around in a case prosecuted by a police force and the words ‘miscarriage of justice’ are even hinted at it is a cause for concern and for the senior investigating officer (SIO) even worse news; and I was that SIO. I slunk back to my office full of trepidation. Over the next few months, a team of police officers led by a detective superintendent crawled all over the case and eventually the appeal court ordered that Causley be released from prison to face a fresh trial.

Much later, in March 2004, Russell Causley once again stood trial for the murder of his wife. The defence argued for four days before a jury was sworn in, that he should not have to face a second trial. It was also alleged that he was suffering from signs of post-traumatic stress disorder and depression. The judge did not accept the arguments presented and ordered that the trial proceed. No evidence was heard in relation to Causley’s conversations with the disputed witnesses. However, despite this, additional evidence was heard from other witnesses and the jury returned a unanimous verdict (again) of guilty of murder and he was for a second time sentenced to life imprisonment. It was not until 2015 that Causley finally admitted murdering his wife in their house in Bournemouth and disposing of her body.

But none of this was known at the time and a great shadow hung over my integrity. Whilst the re-investigation was taking its deliberate course and just to pile on the grief, I was removed from the CID to a small department called ‘Community Safety’. This comprised a dedicated bunch of people who worked on crime prevention and various community projects such as setting up ‘youth shelters’ in parks to give youngsters somewhere to go. A big project they were undertaking involved a warehouse on an industrial estate, which contained all sorts of displays aimed at educating children about the dangers of crossing the road and climbing down into road works and the like. The chief constable thought I would like my own department (of twelve people!). Call me old fashioned but when I learned that my place on CID was to be taken by a ‘Bramshill Flyer’, that is a young in-service superintendent who had never been in the CID in his life, but needed to show such experience on his CV before being promoted to assistant chief constable, I became a little cynical. The fact that this person was returning to the force from a secondment to Her Majesty’s Inspector of Constabulary, who have great influence on chief constables, would of course have had nothing to do with it! It was clear that I had become toxic and remembered that success has many friends but failure is an orphan.

Before I went completely mad, an urge I had had years before came to fruition. During the late 1990s, my wife and I had become increasingly frustrated by the apparent impotence of the world community to end the bloodletting in the Balkans where we watched nightly on our television screens the slaughter of innocent civilians. In early 2000 I had seen an advertisement in the Dorset Police General Orders inviting applications from superintendents to lead the British Forensic Team in Kosovo to assist with mass grave exhumations. The NATO invasion of Kosovo had taken place nine months earlier and was, it must be said, a brave decision by the then Prime Minister Tony Blair, who had in effect led the International Community to rescue the mainly Moslem Albanian population from genocide. My usual good luck seemed to have deserted me and I didn’t get the job. However, in July that year I was in the gym – I had consigned beer and curry as the main off duty exercise of a CID man to the bin years before – when I saw Ian Coombes from the Personnel Department.

‘Oh, hello, Tony,’ he said. ‘The Home Office phoned today to ask if you could take over the British Forensic Team in Kosovo for a couple of months, but I told them you were on leave in August.’

I nearly fainted. I couldn’t believe the opportunity to be involved in such an important and world-shattering event had slipped through my fingers.

‘Ian, forget my leave, forget everything; I want that job, phone them back now please.’

I was reduced to begging; he abandoned his lunch break and made the call. Then, when he did make the call, the guy dealing with it in the Home Office was at lunch, so it was another agonising wait, but yes, I got the job. Now all I had to do was wheedle round the Deputy Chief Constable, George Pothecary, to let me go. I think he knew I had acted correctly and with propriety in the Causley case and badly needed to be immersed back into the world of major crime so he was willing to release me for a couple of months.

Chapter Two

Kosovo 2000

Marshal Tito had held Yugoslavia together since the end of the Second World War. He was a strong man who managed to blend the disparate nationalities of Serb Croat, Slovenian, Kosovo Albanian, Montenegrin and Bosnian into one nation; Yugoslav or South Slav. He also kept Yugoslavia independent from the Soviet Union and had a special status with the West; this kept his country quite prosperous. However, with his death in 1980 and the fall of the Berlin Wall and Soviet era communism, the old nationalist and religious differences arose again, added to which was more than a sprinkling of naked ambition by certain politicians. Notable amongst these was Slobodan Milosevic, a man who would do anything to gain power and feed his ego. He started in Kosovo in the late 1980s by removing Kosovo Albanians from positions of power and influence, just like Hitler removed the Jews from public positions in the 1930s, and then moved onto the rest of Yugoslavia which he tried to run with ethnic Serbs. The Yugoslav Civil War first erupted in Slovenia, followed by Croatia and Bosnia and did not fully come to an end until NATO invaded Kosovo in 1999. In 1995 the CIA assessed that 90 per cent of the atrocities in the Balkans had been carried out by the Serbs. Many of these were at the hands of violent criminals who had been let out of prison by Milosevic and been formed into paramilitary units. They raped, robbed and murdered non-Serb populations, (mainly Muslims) and it was their handiwork which would occupy me.

I flew out to Kosovo on the 8 August 2000 with a considerable amount of sadness at leaving my wife for the next seven weeks. I did however have a sense of excitement about the job in hand and the importance of it. My task was to be the team leader of the British Forensic Team, which was fully funded by the government as part of its contribution in helping bring peace and stability to the Balkans. The British Forensic Team had been tasked to carry out exhumations of suspected war crimes victims in the Pristina area of Kosovo.

The exhumation team was made up of police exhibits officers, photographers, file builders (documentation) and officers whose job it was to dig up the corpses and recover the remains. As part of the usual police black humour they were referred to internally as subterranean technicians. The team also included civilian forensic anthropologists and pathologists, and radiographers, who were usually part of the armed forces medical services, plus a mortuary technician.

The exhumation team was responsible for liaising with the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, (ICTY) who were the lead investigators and from whom we received our directions. Once assigned a map reference, it was the team’s duty to carry out the exhumations, follow evidential identification procedures, carry out post mortems and prepare the evidence to support charges of systematic genocide. After the bodies had passed through this process, they were returned to the next of kin, if known, for re-interment. ICTY was staffed by many former retired and seconded UK police officers, who worked under the direction of the prosecutor, Carla Ponte. The team worked in partnership with other agencies, both governmental and non-governmental organisations and included various UN departments. NATO forces were crucial to the success of the whole effort.

I landed at Skopje Airport, Macedonia, to be met by a wall of heat and the rotund frame of Detective Superintendent Steve Watts of the Hampshire Police, who I was to temporarily replace. He drove me through mountainous tree-lined gorges into the central plain of Kosovo. It immediately led me to believe that if a ground war had been launched by NATO and our troops met with determined resistance from the Serbian army, then it would have been a very bloody business. We arrived in Pristina three hours later at a house where the whole team lived. The pollution in the air was thick – the product of the lack of investment this region had suffered for over ten years since Slobodan Milosevic had deliberately withdrawn funding from Kosovo. A nearby lead factory pumped out enormous clouds of pollution, so much so that pregnant women were barred from serving with international organisations working in this region.

I met the team which was formed of seconded police officers from all over the UK. The three core members were highly experienced officers from South Yorkshire, Northern Ireland and the London Metropolitan Police. These three officers were permanent members of the team, whilst the other specialists rotated in and out every eight weeks. It did take me a few days to convince some of the big city cops that police officers from a rural county like Dorset do deal with more than offences against sheep and one big city cop needed a little help in getting the message. The police and scientific staff blended well together and all worked with total commitment. During my whole trip we only had two days off in seven weeks and we all worked at least ten hours a day.

Over the next two days, Steve Watts bombarded me with names, organisations and procedures which nearly made my brain explode. He also gave me a crash course in Microsoft Excel and helped me open my very first e-mail account. By this time of my career I was used to having my own personal assistant, but there is no such luxury on foreign missions; you have to do everything yourself. I had to run just to stand still and I became accustomed to the sound of AK47 fire most evenings, dubbed ‘happy-fire’ by the veterans. A gun and vendetta culture existed in this region and homicides in Pristina were frequent during my stay.

After a hot and humid night with little sleep and lots of worry about whether I was up to it, I was awoken by the wail of the muezzin at 5am calling the faithful to prayer. This was also the signal to get up in order to be at the gravesite by 6am. We were engaged in a mass exhumation of sixty-three people buried at Makoc cemetery by relatives. These people had been pulled out of a convoy of refugees in March/April of 1999, robbed and then shot at short range – very short range in many cases. Amongst the dead at Makoc was an eight-year-old girl who had been shot running away from the murderous scene. Her father was also present at the exhumation as he had buried her in a hurry with the other victims in a shallow grave. She had been staying for safety with her uncle, who had survived the murder of a group of fifty villagers and was a witness to the slaughter of his friends and his niece. Why he survived and she didn’t I was unable to find out; no doubt this will haunt him until the day he dies.

There was considerable evidence to show that many of the victims had been shot numerous times about the body in a chillingly systematic manner. The killers were believed to be paramilitaries, supposedly Arkan’s White Wolves. I attended the mortuary every day which was based in Pristina hospital to ensure that we could cope with the throughput of bodies and maintain the high standard of autopsies. The pathologist was Peter Venezis, later awarded an OBE, and the forensic archaeologist was the world renowned Dr Sue Black. The pathologist told me that he had noticed a distinct pattern in the gunshot wounds found in the bodies he had been examining from Makoc and elsewhere. In very many cases, the fatal wound was a shot to the head from an AK47. The back of the skull was shattered, which indicated that the muzzle of the gun must have been placed against the head, as it was the gas discharged from the gun which entered the skull cavity and exploded the back of the head. A gunshot from a high powered rifle fired at a distance normally produces a small circular entry wound and a larger and more ragged exit wound with shards of bone facing in the direction of travel of the bullet. The skull would not be so extensively shattered as in these cases. Peter also noticed that the victims of this very close quarter shooting had received gunshot wounds in both sides of the chest, damaging both scapulae; there was also a shot to the groin. A couple of weeks after he had told me of his suspicions, I was on the site of an exhumation when I received a radio message from him to meet him in the mortuary room. I returned to the hospital and Peter showed me a corpse bearing the hall-marks of a shattered skull, gunshot wounds to chest and groin but also damage to the underside of the chin. Peter indicated to me a clear groove running up from the underside of the front of the chin into the brain cavity. That was it, the killers fired one shot into the left side of the victim’s upper chest, then one to the opposite side, then a further shot into the groin to increase the pain and then the coup de grace with the muzzle under the chin and a single shot from the front so the victim could see his end coming. The gun shot pattern was of course, the sign of the cross.

The emotional strain was to become normal as exhumations continued over the next few weeks – a family of eight here, an old couple there, beaten and shoved face-down into a shallow pit. The nature of the people was a striking contrast with the wickedness which had been used against them. The victims and their families were by and large rural peasants, dressed poorly, quite often in old suits and waistcoats with discoloured shirts and often sporting berets in the French rural style of fifty years ago. I did start to notice that on a number of occasions, the Kosovo Albanians who had contacted ICTY investigators about murdered family members and who had been passed to us for action were young, in their mid-twenties and quite athletic. They would point out to us plots of land where their families had been buried, which was usually in and around the family home. I was later to find out that many of these young Kosovo Albanians were members of the UCK (Ushria Clirmtare e Kosoves), or KLA (Kosovo Liberation Army). The KLA had been classed by NATO as freedom fighters, but by Serbian authorities as terrorists. A pattern emerged of Kosovo Serbian police arriving at a house to arrest suspected UCK or KLA members only to find that they had fled the family home and were hiding in the mountains. The response was one very familiar in the Balkans; if they could not get the people they were after, they shot the parents and family instead. I was to see this again in Bosnia, where organised criminals threatened Bosnian police officers with threats of ‘if you arrest us we will kill your children’; and they meant it.

The exhumation process involved military protection from the nationality in charge of that particular sector. Norwegian engineers deployed an armoured digger and I can swear that the Norwegian soldier driving it could peel a hard-boiled egg with the blade of the shovel. British bomb disposal soldiers (EOD) made a sweep of the site before we started our work and Royal Marines provided the lorry to transport the corpses back to the mortuary. They also pitched in and helped with the removal of bodies from the graves. It was awe-inspiring to watch soldiers from different nationalities welding together with the police in the difficult physical and emotional task of these recoveries. The disgust felt at the crimes committed and the sympathy for the families present was commonly experienced by us all and very tangible.

Quite incredibly, the identities of the killers were known to many eye witnesses. They were frequently local policemen or paramilitaries or often came from neighbouring villages. I was given a detailed list of one group of men from a Kosovan Serb village who had carried out a raid on a Muslim village not a mile away. They had killed their Muslim neighbours and taken away ploughs, horses and other livestock. I made sure to hand a statement we obtained to the ICTY investigators. Unfortunately, they told me that their threshold for prosecutions was only at the level of the commanders who ...