Left to rot in a Taliban hell hole, a British Army major was put in Afghan jail on false charges. What did our diplomats do? Nothing


In a gripping new book, Major Bill Shaw reveals how a false bribery accusation led to him being thrown in a notorious Afghan prison and how the experience nearly drove him insane.

Bill Shaw during an appeals court session in Kabul in 2010

Bill Shaw during an appeals court session in Kabul in 2010

The prison gate slammed shut behind me and, to my horror, I was inside Tawqeef, Kabul’s feared and forbidding criminal detention centre, wrongly incarcerated on a trumped-up charge of corruption.

As I looked around me, I could tell straight away that it was unfit for human habitation and that what lay ahead of me was my idea of hell.

The mud walls were cracked, the floors pitted, and the entire building smelled of decay and poor sanitation. The corridor that stretched before me was flooded and yet so overcrowded that scores of inmates had no choice but to huddle along it. The majority stood in striped uniforms or lay in dirty puddles, their eyes staring out of faces gaunt with hunger and despair.

I was ushered into a 4m by 4m cell in which 16 Afghans lived, ate and slept. Chipped metal bunk-beds for ten people were screwed to the walls, and the concrete floor was covered in grubby grey blankets for the rest.

Through the thick pall of cigarette smoke, the stark white light from two fluorescent tubes picked out each green globule of sneeze or spit and showed up every stain on clothing, bedding and  blankets. A small television in one corner broadcast an image of an imam reciting passages from the Koran.

Mindful of local customs, I removed my shoes and placed them with the assortment of sandals and flip-flops just inside the door. I paid my respects to my fellow cellmates — ‘Salaam  Alaikum’ (Peace be upon you) — and some responded in kind, but not everyone. Two mullahs with their long beards and white turbans seemed especially wary.

Outside in the corridor, other prisoners crowded the doorway and hung on the bars to glare at the Westerner, dropped like a lamb into their midst. From their appearance it was obvious that some were Taliban.

How had I, a respected former British Army officer with an impeccable record, got into this dreadful and dangerous situation? And was I going to get out alive?

Afghan Police unchain the hands of Bill Shaw, former British Army officer, during a court hearingin Kabul, Afghanistan

Afghan Police unchain the hands of Bill Shaw, former British Army officer, during a court hearing in Kabul, Afghanistan

Bill Shaw with Tony Blair. This picture features in Mr Shaw's book, Kill Switch

Bill Shaw with Tony Blair. This picture features in Mr Shaw's book, Kill Switch

It had all begun six months earlier in October 2009 when I had left the secure compound of the private security firm I worked for in Kabul to sort out an incident on the dusty six-lane highway connecting the centre of Afghanistan’s sprawling capital city with the airport.

With frequent roadside bombs planted by Taliban insurgents, drive-by shootings and suicide bombers, it was aptly dubbed ‘Route Violent’.

A 51-year-old former Army major with close on 30 years in the Royal Military Police, I was in Afghanistan working for Group 4 Securicor, the world’s largest private security company. I was the contracts director in charge of 400 Afghan staff and 500 Gurkhas.

Earlier that day, I had sent out two of my local staff on a routine job to pick up a senior colleague arriving  at the airport. They travelled in one of our fleet of 30 armoured Toyota Land Cruisers.

An hour later, they radioed that they had been stopped at a random road block, where the £92,000 vehicle had been seized at gunpoint by secret policemen of the National Directorate of Security (NDS), the Afghanistan government’s intelligence agency.

Bill Shaw was awarded the MBE

Bill Shaw was awarded the MBE

Its 5,000 officers, who report directly to President Hamid Karzai, were widely feared and fast becoming a law unto themselves. They had confiscated weapons from us before but handed them back as soon as we produced the correct operating licences.

I fully expected the same thing to happen with the Land Cruiser as I drove along Route Violent, a pistol in my holster and a couple of AK47 rifles in the foot-well.

When I got to the scene, six pick-up trucks festooned with grenade launchers and heavy machine-guns were blocking the road. I spotted our Land Cruiser parked to one side and went to speak to the NDS commander, who was standing beneath the barrel of a machine-gun.

He saw me, the only Westerner in the crowd. Then his eye rested on the Land Cruiser I had come in and he gestured to his men to seize that as well.

I pulled out our Ministry of Interior licences to show him, but he wouldn’t look at them. At one point we were nose-to-nose glaring at each other, and I could see that his eyes were bloodshot, his pupils enlarged and he was high on drugs.

So I gave in. I’d been in flashpoints like this many times before,  from Northern Ireland to Iraq, and I knew how quickly things can escalate. I knew I couldn’t risk the lives of  my men.

Gutted, I watched as our vehicles were driven away, along with the £15,000 worth of weapons, tracking systems and high-tech satellite phones each had inside.

A few days after the incident, we got a demand from the NDS. Pay them a £15,000 ‘release fee’ and they would return our Land Cruisers. I was against giving in to extortion, but my bosses decided we had no choice other than to go along with this.

Then, once we’d got the vehicles back, we would lodge a formal complaint with the Afghan authorities.

So, through one of our local staff, an interpreter named Maiwand Limar, we brokered a deal with a man by the name of Eidi Mohammad, and I was sent to make the trade.

Once I’d handed over the cash and received the vehicles back, I told this Eidi Mohammad: ‘We’ll need an official receipt, for our accounts.’ Smiling beneath his mirrored sunglasses, he assured me we’d be sent the proper paperwork.

We never were, and the longer we waited for that ‘release fee’ receipt, the more we realised we’d been the victims of a sting. Corruption was endemic in Afghanistan and ‘baksheesh’ (a tip or bribe) was expected for almost everything.

Bill Shaw receives his MBE from the Queen

Major Shaw receives his MBE from the Queen

Then the NDS then lifted three more of our vehicles and demanded £6,000 each for their return, it was clear something had to be done.

Encouraged by the fact that President Karzai had just announced a new anti-corruption drive, we made a complaint to the Ministry of the Interior. Because I’d been the person in charge when the Land Cruisers were taken, the official complaint was in my name.

It was then that a nightmarish  situation began to unfold. It turned out Eidi Mohammad, the man we’d paid the money to get our vehicles back, had fled. Worse still, Maiwand, our interpreter, was apparently  blaming me.

I was no longer the wronged complainant. I was now the chief  suspect accused of bribery.
I couldn’t believe what was happening and went straight to the British embassy. ‘We can’t advise you,’ was all the officials there would say, despite my protests that this was palpably unfair and wrong. I was on my own.

When I told Liz, my wife, on the phone, she wanted me to fly home straight away and I could have done just that. ‘But that would make me look guilty,’ I told her. ‘I’d be unemployed and unemployable. I have to stay.’

There shouldn’t be a problem, I reassured her. Common sense would prevail. But if I was detained, the British embassy would come to my aid.

So as requested, I presented myself at the office of the Afghan Anti-Corruption Unit. It was in March last year, five months after the original incident. I had already had several meetings there with no problems, but this time I was told: ‘You are being arrested and taken to a detention centre.

‘This is a complete farce!’ I protested angrily, as I was forced into the back of a waiting car and, flanked by two armed Afghans, driven to Tawqeef.

Shackled: Bill Shaw nervously awaits the verdict in the Afghan court in July 2010

Shackled: Bill Shaw nervously awaits the verdict in the Afghan court in July 2010

In the blink of an eye, I was about to go from an upstanding member of society to being treated as a common criminal. My so-called crime? To tell the truth. Being honest, open and fair had served me well my whole life, but in ravaged Afghanistan I was to learn that truth was just another commodity — to be bought and sold. The self-serving lies of others had put me in hell. 

We were the ones who had been ripped off, not the other way round. The injustice of my situation grated against the principles by which I’d always tried to live in my 30 years of service in the Royal Military Police.

Inside my crowded cell, I found a space on the floor and sat down to gather my thoughts. Cockroaches dropped from the ceiling onto me, which had me in a frenzy brushing them off. Flies buzzed me repeatedly.

‘Hold it together, Billy,’ I told myself. ‘You’ll be out of here in no time.’ Every time a guard appeared, I imagined he’d come for me. He never did. There’d been no word from my company or from the British embassy, despite promises to get me out of there as soon as they could.

Later that night, food arrived — a mess of cold lamb’s fat and rice in a bucket — and my cellmates reached in to scoop food into their mouths.

I kept a wary eye on the other inmates. There were drug smugglers, thieves and murderers, but it was the Taliban that I needed to watch

Though I hadn’t eaten since  early morning, suddenly I wasn’t hungry. After the meal, prayers were said to Allah. My only prayer was that nobody would slit my throat before I was released.
That night I barely slept.

‘Won’t be long now, Billy,’ I said to myself over and over in my head. ‘You’ll be out of here tomorrow. You’ll see.’

I wasn’t. Summoned to the gate the next morning, I found Azim, my right-hand man in the company and the best fixer and negotiator I’d ever had, waiting for me. ‘Mr Bill sir,’ he said, tears spilling down his cheeks, ‘I’m sorry, so sorry.’

Then he began to push personal items through the bars towards me — a toothbrush, a shaving kit, some soap. A sleeping bag followed, a towel, bottles of water, a change of clothes.

I was filled with cold, hard dread as the realisation hit me. I wasn’t going anywhere. Dazed, I walked back to my cell and sat with my face turned to the wall. Was this really happening to me?

It was. When two British embassy officials came to see me it was to say that they couldn’t interfere in the ‘due process’ of the Afghan legal system.

Head high as if on the parade ground at Sandhurst, where I’d once been an instructor, I marched from one end of the dusty prison compound to the other, back and forward a hundred times as part of my daily regime to stay fit.

All the time I kept a wary eye on the other inmates. There were drug smugglers, thieves and murderers, but it was the Taliban that I needed to watch.

Bill Shaw talks with his Afghan former colleague Maiwand Limar during an appeals court session in Kabul in 2010

Bill Shaw talks with his Afghan former colleague Maiwand Limar during an appeals court session in Kabul in 2010

One glared at me, an ‘infidel’, with open hostility. Another barged into me, almost knocking me off my feet. A third came up to me, smiled and ominously drew his finger across his throat. I sidestepped him and carried on my way.

I knew the key to survival was to remain focused. I had to keep myself in shape, mentally and physically. I had to keep believing in myself — no matter what. I found ways of managing my disgust at the cockroaches and the mould, the mice and rats, the over-flowing toilets and the lack of proper washing facilities.

I became accustomed to itching like hell from the lice that took up residence in my hair, skin and clothing.

All my 30 years of impeccable service as an Army man — rising through the ranks from private to major — I had been fastidiously clean and tidy. Now I was permanently unshaven, dirty and smelly. I hated that aspect of my incarceration with every fibre of my being.

Discipline was harsh inside Tawqeef. Fights often broke out — usually over drugs or food — and the guards would wade in, swinging lengths of hosepipe to separate the combatants.

Then the culprits were handcuffed to the courtyard gates in a crucifix position. Sometimes I had to block my ears against the screams. But I was lucky in that the inmates of the cell I was assigned went out of their way to protect me.

Outside my cell, though, I was a target, as the prison commandant himself warned me. I used some of my cash my friends brought in for me to pay bearded ‘bouncers’ to sleep in our corridor at night and keep out would-be intruders.

It was, however, the guards who hassled me the most. Those at the gate took their pick of whatever goodies my friends sent in for me while those inside wanted cash and would rub their index finger over my palm as an invitation for baksheesh.

I could, of course, have played the same game and bought my way out of the entire situation. ‘It is common to pay, William,’ I was told by fellow prisoners.

For £6,000, a judge could be found to release me. I said no. That would be flying in the face of all I stood for

For £6,000, a judge could be found to release me. I said no. That would be flying in the face of all I stood for. There were no guarantees, anyway, that the judge wouldn’t take the money and still leave me locked up.

Finally, the day for my trial arrived and, trussed up like some character from a Dickensian clink with handcuffs on my wrist secured to a ring on a chain round my waist, I was taken to court.

I had every reason to believe I was about to be cleared. My co-defendant was Maiwand, the interpreter who had been with me the day I paid a man I thought was a police commander for the return of our Land Cruisers. In fact, it was Maiwand who had conducted the negotiations.

‘All we did was pay the NDS what it demanded,’ I said to him one day in Tawqeef. He looked sheepish. ‘We no pay the NDS,’ he said. The man we’d handed over £15,000 to, he explained, was just a private individual who’d offered himself as a go-between.

The NDS had in fact released the vehicles for free, while this man disappeared with our cash.

Though there was clearly something very fishy about Maiwand’s part in all this, what he had just told me meant that the man I paid wasn’t a government official after all, so bribery could not have taken place. Self-evidently, the case against me had to be dropped.

Arriving at the anti-corruption court — a building paid for, refurbished and furnished by the British taxpayer — dozens of reporters and TV cameras were waiting for me.

As I staggered through a gauntlet of lenses and microphones, I have never been more humiliated. What if my grandchildren saw pictures of me in chains? I wanted the red Afghan dirt to open up and swallow me.

But once inside, I was upbeat. My lawyer, Kim Motley, a glamorous American woman who specialised in helping foreigners ensnared in the Afghan criminal justice system, told the judge there was no case to answer.

‘The NDS has confirmed that no money was paid to any official, which means there are no material elements for the crime of bribery.’

The judge appeared to agree with her, until the prosecutor intervened. Because the man we claimed we had paid the money to had disappeared and could not be produced in court, we had produced no witnesses to confirm that we’d been cheated. The legal presumption had to be, therefore, that we were guilty.

I felt the atmosphere shift. The judge stopped agreeing with Kim and instead gave the prosecutor another week to draw up his case. Dazed, I was ushered out. I was going back to prison.

The thought overwhelmed me. ‘How much longer?’ I asked her, close to losing it. ‘A week? A month? A year?’

If I imagined things couldn’t get any worse, though, I was wrong. I didn’t know it, but ahead lay not release in seven days’ time but an experience that very nearly drove me insane.

*Adapted from KILL SWITCH, by Bill Shaw, published today by Headline at £14.99. © 2011 Bill Shaw. To order a copy for £12.99 (inc p&p), call 0843 382 0000.

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