Sir Keir Starmer should launch an inquiry to determine the cause of the 1994 Chinook helicopter crash in which 29 serving military personnel died, former defence secretary Sir Liam Fox has said.
Sir Liam, who has been working with the Chinook Justice Campaign, said new evidence suggested the Ministry of Defence and RAF may have misled two previous inquiries into the 1994 tragedy over the Mull of Kintyre in south-west Scotland.
On Tuesday, he delivered a letter to Number 10 alongside families of the victims, exactly 32 years after the disaster, demanding an investigation into the exact cause of the tragedy.
Speaking to reporters just after he had handed in the letter, he said: “We want there to be an overview of the whole of tragedy, not just the immediate cause of the crash, which was looked into, or the pilots’ responsibility, and they obviously were cleared.
“But what was the sequence of events that led up to this? We want Sir Keir to set up a mechanism of looking into the whole issue with people who will be qualified to look at all the data.
“We want the inquiry to be guaranteed access to all the information that we require, so that we can produce for once a complete narrative that sets out, in detail, all the decision-making points and how they were taken.
“The families feel that they have never been given the whole story at any one point, that bits of it have been looked into. And what they want is truth, and they want closure.
“There’s an opportunity now for the Prime Minister who, let’s face it, has had a politically difficult period to show his lawyerly instincts for natural justice.”
Sir Liam’s inquiry in 2011 concluded that an initial decision to blame pilots Flight Lieutenants Rick Cook and Jonathan Tapper was incorrect.
However, new evidence sourced from Freedom of Information requests have prompted calls for a further inquiry.
In his letter, Sir Liam said he had “deep concerns” that “vital information may have been withheld from ministers and Parliament”, and that information provided by the MoD “on the airworthiness of the aircraft was not correct”.
Gaynor Tobias, 75, from Watford, whose husband Lieutenant Colonel John Tobias MBE died in the crash, attended Downing Street.
She told Press Association: “It would be tremendous to put this to bed. We don’t feel we can move on with all this dishonesty and deceit. We would like the Government to not be so intransigent, to work with us.
“Perhaps an apology would be nice and we would like to know this won’t happen to any other family again. We’ll carry on fighting. We’re a strong group.
“We had a meeting with three ministers in December, who said that they would enter into dialogue with us. Unfortunately, when it came to March we hadn’t heard anything from them. It made us a little bit disappointed because we didn’t really feel that they had listened to us.”
Her son Andy Tobias, 40, said: “We have huge amounts of evidence. We’re going to continue to fight to have that evidence reviewed by the right people, and the truth always comes out.
“It’s been very positive to come to here today. We really, really hope that the Prime Minister will listen and we hope that we’ll get an opportunity to get to the truth and justice for my father.”
