Mother’s diary seeks justice for Nimrod crash victims

Published on Sunday 22 January 2012 00:00

ON SATURDAY Ben Knight would have been 31 and the focus of a family celebration. Instead, 28 January will mark the publication of a book that explains how his family coped with the young airman’s death six years ago and their quest to bring those they believe responsible to justice.

Ben was one of 14 servicemen killed in an explosion in 2006 aboard a Nimrod reconnaissance aircraft in the skies above Afghanistan.

Now his mother Trish has turned the diaries she has kept since he died into an emotional account she hopes will remind politicians that, despite the “incompetence of his own side”, no-one has faced prosecution over the incident.

Trish said: “I want to show everyone how hard we’ve worked – that we’ve tried our very best to get some sort of justice for Ben. But no action has been taken against anyone in a court of law and I just feel that should be known.

“A lot of people have said they think that, as years go by and compensation is paid, then that’s that. But 14 men were killed and the fact that no-one has been prosecuted is disgraceful.”

The Crash of Nimrod XV230: A Victim’s Perspective charts the astonishing quest for truth and justice mounted by Trish and husband Graham to discover why Ben, 11 other RAF servicemen and two soldiers were killed when the Nimrod, from RAF Kinloss, in Moray, exploded in November 2006 over Helmand province. The blast happened minutes after refuelling, when a fire broke out on the plane.

Their campaign led to the establishment of an independent investigation into the crash of the ageing Nimrod – brought into service in 1969 – which was to conclude, in a scathing report, that a litany of leadership failures at the heart of the Ministry of Defence, safety flaws driven by cost-cutting, and a culture of “incompetence, complacency and cynicism” were to blame.

The book tells how the Knights uncovered crucial evidence of problems with the Nimrod fleet and their frustration about flawed attempts to, in Trish’s words,“obtain an element of justice for Ben by bringing those people responsible for his death and the loss of XV230 to account. “

Ben, an RAF sergeant and one of a “band of brothers” at Kinloss, was the youngest of the Knights’ three sons and only 25 when he died. Early assumptions that the Nimrod had been downed by a Taleban missile quickly began to fade as the Knights began to uncover their own evidence, pointing to flaws in the maintenance programme for the Nimrod fleet. Trish, a civil servant based in Bridgwater, Somerset, said: “We pushed the RAF police to investigate and I am sure we instigated their inquiry. I felt we forced them to look into it more deeply than they probably would have.

“We also pressed Somerset Police initially to investigate because the deaths by then had been recorded as accidental. I think a lot of people –many of them ex-military – felt it was just an accident and that these things happen. It may have been an accident …but all accidents still have a cause.”

As she bluntly states in the book’s foreword: “In our opinion our son was killed by incompetence, not insurgents.”

The couple’s media campaign has kept the tragedy in the spotlight. And in 2008 they launched a legal action against then Defence Secretary John Hutton alleging negligence, failure to minimise risk and breach of the right to life. A year later Charles Haddon-Cave, QC, who had chaired the independent review into the Nimrod crash, published his damning report. He concluded safety had been sacrificed in a drive to cut costs.

The Knights claim their son was killed “by the incompetence of his own side”. And a month after Haddon-Cave reported they called on the Crown Prosecution Service to investigate whether senior personnel in defence firms BAE Systems and QinetiQ, should face criminal charges. So far, those calls have gone unanswered. Meantime, Trish continues to grieve for her youngest son. “I am proud of all my sons and still miss Ben every day,” she said. “He was young and outgoing, bright and cheeky. There are photos in the house and he’s around the house. I think some people think it’s only Remembrance Day or perhaps Christmas that you miss him. But no – I am aware of him all the time.”

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