British Army, police used waterboarding as a torture method in Northern Ireland

New BBC investigation ‘Inside the Torture Chamber’ reveals use by police and army

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Recreation of the torture method of waterboarding - new documentary claims Northern Irish police used this technique.

Photo by Amnesty International

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The British Army and the RUC used waterboarding as a torture method in Northern Ireland over 40 years ago.

Sensational new claims about the method are made in a new BBC documentary.

The programme features claims that waterboarding was used during the Troubles.

Water boarding has become a central and highly controversial part of the West’s war against al-Qaeda since the Twin Towers attack.

Now the BBC radio programme ‘Inside the Torture Chamber’ reveals that the technique was used 40 years ago by the British Army in Ulster.

Allegations are also made that it was used by RUC detectives in Castlereagh police station in Belfast.

The programme features a major contribution from Liam Holden who was 19 years old in 1972 when members of the British Army’s Parachute Regiment took him to their base on the Black Mountain in Belfast.

Holden was accused of killing a soldier. The British Army threatened to shoot him and then used water boarding as part of their interrogation.

Holden reveals: “They got the bucket of water and they just slowly but surely poured the bucket of water right round the facial area, over my nose and mouth.

“It was like pouring a kettle of water, like pouring your tea into a cup out of the kettle, that sort of speed, basically until I passed out or close to passed out.”

Holden confessed to the murder after several hours of interrogation.

The BBC website reports that he gave his trial in Belfast Crown Court a detailed account of his interrogation. Neither the judge nor jury believed him and he became the last person in the United Kingdom to be sentenced to death.

Holden spent four weeks in the condemned man’s cell at Crumlin Road jail in Belfast before his sentence was commuted to life in prison.

He was imprisoned for 17 years for a murder he did not commit before his conviction was quashed by the Court of Appeal earlier this year.

For the BBC programme, Holden agreed to go back to Crumlin Road jail to visit the condemned man’s cell.

He adds: “You were walking out that door and you saw where people had been buried who had been hung in Crumlin Road jail and you were sort of next in line.”

The documentary also features evidence from Felim O Hamill who says he was subjected to a similar interrogation technique in an attempt to force him to confess to a murder.

The Cork University lecturer was sentenced to 25 years in prison after being caught in England in 1994 in a car containing explosives and a gun. O Hamill was released early under the Good Friday Agreement.

During his interrogation in 1978 at Castlereagh police station in Belfast, he was subjected to a form of water torture.

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