But he talked to him and then said that he could continue the exam. The absence of identities in this report tells you all you need to know about the terror which embraces Baghdad. "I was invigilating the last exams of term in the linguistics department and I saw a mature student cheating I walked up to him and said I believed he was cribbing He said he wasn't. I told him I would take his papers away and he leant towards me and made it clear I would be murdered if I prevented him completing his exams I went to the head of department. Another good friend, a university professor, visits me for coffee the next day. Sometimes they are murdered and I go to their families to express those condolences which are especially painful for me - because I am a Westerner, arriving to say how sorry I am to relatives who blame the West for the anarchy that killed their loved ones This time my friend survived, just.
At about the same time, I came across a friend at one of Baghdad's best-known hotels. He is the deputy manager and I've known him for more than three years, but he now looked twice his age He grasped my arm and looked into my face. "Mr Robert," he said, "do you realise I was kidnapped?" Every day now, I come across Iraqi acquaintances - or friends who have cousins or fathers or sons - who have been kidnapped Often they are released. On Monday, George Bush was praising the greedy sectarian politicians here - who had totally failed to meet the new Iraqi constitution deadline - for their "heroic" efforts for "democracy". Given that the police sometimes shoot innocent civilians and that surveillance cock-ups are hardly unknown, how was it possible for a policy of shoot-to-kill to have been authorised without Parliament or the public being consulted? There was no inquiry into the policy being followed in Gibraltar; there must surely be one into the policy revealed by the Stockwell shooting.Roger Bolton was editor of Thames Television's 'Death on the Rock' programme into the Gibraltar shootings. And we in the media sometimes want to know answers before we have even formulated the right questions.If the authorities say nothing, they can be accused of covering up; and if they say too much too early, they are likely to make mistakes.So I don't think it is surprising that in the heat of the moment inaccurate information was given.
It was something like 500lb of explosives, packed with bits of metal, shrapnel and so on.ITN reported: "Army explosives experts used a robot to defuse the bomb." It also said that "a fierce gun battle broke out".On the day after, the then minister for the armed forces, Ian Stewart, congratulated the Gibraltar government, and went on: "Military personnel were involved. It does look as though the facts, or at least most of them, will come out.In the case of the Gibraltar shootings, Margaret Thatcher's government refused demands for such an inquiry, saying that an inquest there would suffice.The IRA member was not, of course, an innocent. The organisation itself admitted that he was a member of an active service unit, and there is no doubt that he and his colleagues did intend to plant a bomb in Gibraltar, though not on that day.In the immediate aftermath of Gibraltar, there were also official briefings, just as inaccurate as those relating to Stockwell.The BBC reported that there had been a massive bomb. The official version of events in the immediate aftermath was soon shown to be wildly inaccurate. Those investigating the death have been hampered in their inquiries.
