Scot held captive by Saddam Hussein hopes new documentary will help fight for justice

Daily Record

a day ago

Air steward Charlie Kristiansson was one of 385 passengers and crew taken hostage when BA Flight 149 was sent into a war zone.
A Scot held captive by Saddam Hussein after a BA flight was sent into a war zone hopes a new documentary will help in his long fight for justice.
Air steward Charlie Kristiansson was one of 385 passengers and crew taken hostage when BA Flight 149 was allowed to make a refuelling stop in Kuwait – despite British authorities knowing the Iraqi invasion was under way.
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The terrified hostages, including 11 children, were deployed by Saddam as 'human shields' at military sites and were subjected to starvation, beatings and sexual assault by their Iraqi captors.
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A class legal action by the hostages accuses the UK Government and British Airways of 'deliberately endangering them', alleging the flight was being used to deliver a covert British intelligence-gathering team.
Charlie, of Uddingston, Lanarkshire, said he hopes Sky documentary Flight 149: Hostage of War will pile pressure on authorities to tell the truth after a 35-year-long 'cover-up'. He said: 'The documentary is just another step in our harrowing journey. That flight was a Trojan horse. I want the Government and BA dragged into the courts and forced to tell the truth.
'The suffering was unbearable and it was all avoidable. We were betrayed by the Government and I will never forgive them. I am furious.'
Charlie said his 132 days in captivity left him so broken that at times he prayed for death to free him. He was raped and beaten, and became so ill and emaciated he feared he would eventually 'just fade away'.
The 28-year-old was on the London to Malaysia flight tending passengers and preparing the plane on the ground when Iraqi jets began bombing Kuwait International Airport on August 2, 1990. Explosions shredded the runway and there was a stampede as crew shepherded passengers off the plane and on to buses, driven by evacuating Kuwaiti ground staff.
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The Iraqi military rounded up foreigners and they were taken to the Kuwaiti City's Regency Palace Hotel to be 'guests of Iraq'.
As they were being bussed to the Regency, Charlie witnessed the destruction of Kuwait laid bare, the bodies of the murdered were abandoned amid the bombed out cars and buildings.
One passenger saw a pregnant Kuwaiti woman being bayoneted.
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Despite the horrors they witnessed, the passengers and crew believed the British Government and BA would save them. But Charlie said: 'They offered us no help at all. We soon realised we were on our own.'
Charlie, seven other men and four BA stewardesses were taken to Shuwaikh Port in Kuwait City, where they were thrown into an abandoned bungalow which was covered in excrement and infested with flies. At the bungalow, the hostages were terrorised by Iraqi soldiers and told they'd be shot if they tried to escape.
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Charlie, who was 6ft 5in, saw his weight plummet to only 6.5 stones.
At one point, a guard agreed to source food but dropped off the leg of a giraffe which had been shot at the zoo.
Charlie refused to eat it but others did. When he got severe toothache, an Iraqi officer offered to take him to a dentist but he drove him to an abandoned tower and raped him at gunpoint. In the November, he was wrenched from the group and taken to Baghdad, and billeted in a missile base alongside six captured Scottish airforce pilots who were regularly tortured.
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But at the base, Charlie was visited by a kind Iraqi doctor who persuaded the guards to let him be taken to hospital. There, he allowed Charlie to call his mum back home in Scotland.
He said: 'It was like she was in the world of the living and I was trapped in hell with the dead. I felt I would never see her again.'
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After five months in captivity, the hostages were freed in the December.
Charlie left BA after 13 years as more information emerged about the disregard authorities had shown to Flight 149. He now lives in Luxembourg, where he teaches English.
It was 4.13am, Kuwaiti time when BA Flight 149 had touched down on August 2. Yet more than an hour earlier, then-prime minister Margaret Thatcher had been told Saddam had invaded. It was only in November 2021 the Foreign Office finally admitted the Government had been warned with plenty of time to divert
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the flight.
It denied a covert intelligence team was on board or that BA was warned not to land.
In the documentary, Tony Paice, head of MI6 in Kuwait, alleged he had warned a senior staff member from BA.
Numerous passengers said they saw a mysterious group of 10 men, believed to be the covert operatives, get on but their existence continues to be denied. British Airways said government records in 2021 confirmed the airline was not warned.
Flight 149: Hostage of War is on Sky Documentaries from Wednesday, June 11.