Back to Iraq: The prison

John Nichol revisits an Iraqi cell where he was held during the Gulf War

Ten years after being shot down over an Iraqi airfield during the Gulf War, former RAF navigator John Nichol has been back to Iraq. In the first of three reports, BBC Breakfast News correspondent Paul Welsh went with John Nichol to one of the squalid prison cells where he was held.

It is a long drive from the capital of Jordan to Baghdad - plenty of time to remember torture and captivity in Iraqi jails. The former RAF navigator John Nichol was going back to Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

As we approached the border he admitted "a certain degree of trepidation. A few butterflies in the stomach".

Ten years ago he and his colleague pilot John Peters were shot down as they tried to bomb an Iraqi airfield.

They were tortured and forced to make "confessions" on Iraqi TV. In Britain those pictures are among the abiding images of the Gulf War.

John's fears were understandable, but unnecessary. On this visit he was to be well received and well treated by the Iraqi government and its people.

In Baghdad they gave us special, unprecedented access to the military prison at Al Rashid airbase.

John Nichol in his prison cell "confession"

Terrifying

When he was taken to jail as a prisoner of war he was blindfolded and terrified, so when we arrived at the huge, white, iron barred gates he was unsure whether it was one of the places he had been held.

When he saw whitewashed buildings, with barbed wire along the edge of their roofs, he thought we might be in the right place.

There was a red stripe along the side of the buildings, a stripe just like he'd seen from his narrow cell window 10 years ago.

Walking through a rusty iron gate into a compound surrounded by cells and high walls a look of recognition flashed across his face.

It was only inside just such a square that he'd been allowed to see where he was all those years ago.

"I think this is it" he said as he walked up to a cell window. He looked through the bars. "Yes, it is, this is it".

Painful memories

Somebody was saying at the gate that they're amazed I'm back here. They're as amazed to see me as I am that we have been allowed to look.

John Nichol

The brigadier of military police had ordered his men to smash open the doors with a sledge-hammer, the cells had been unused since John and the other allied prisoners were released and the keys had been lost.

Dust sparkles in the shafts of light which break through the bars of a small window high in the cell wall. The room is small and dingy.

In the half light John looks around and examines the graffiti on the patchy cream coloured walls.

"There's certainly a tremble in my hands," he told me as he crouched in the corner of the cell beside abandoned plates and a dusty half eaten meal. "Especially because there are so many Iraqi soldiers around".

For a moment his eyes flicked towards the cell door and the military police looking in at us.

"Somebody was saying at the gate that they are amazed I'm back here. They're as amazed to see me as I am that we have been allowed to look. There's a tremble in my hands, there's no doubt about it, and I guess in the end I'll be happy to leave this place again."

Torture

In seven weeks with the enemy John Nichol underwent torture and ill treatment, often blindfolded and kept alone for days on end, but there were moments of kindness and humanity too.

John relived one such time with the guards based here today; in the courtyard they played football, as he did once in the Gulf War.

"Some of the times were bad times, I'm pleased it was that prison." he told me.

"I would not have wanted to go back to the bad place. I didn't realise until today that I would not want to do it, but I now know."

John Nichol is learning more about himself than where he was held for seven momentous weeks of his life ten years ago.