Lawyer tells how massacre by Scots Guards was covered up for 60 years

Soldiers on patrol during the Malaya Emergency (Getty)

Successive UK governments have covered up the killings of 24 unarmed Malaysian rubber plantation workers by British troops in 1948, a lawyer representing relatives of the victims said yesterday.

The current government’s refusal last November to hold a formal investigation into the massacre will be challenged during a two-day judicial review hearing due to begin at the High Court today.

John Halford, one of the families’ UK-based lawyers, said: “What happened at Batang Kali was an extremely serious human rights abuse on any view at all.

“It was a massacre of 24 unarmed people who weren’t in any sense combatants, weren’t offering any kind of threat to the British troops who killed them.

“That in itself is serious enough, but what then followed was a cover-up that has basically lasted the following 60 years to this day, where the British government has denied anything untoward happened at all.”

The massacre, involving a platoon of Scots Guards, occurred on 12 December, 1948, while British troops were conducting military operations to combat the post-Second World War Communist insurgency of the Malayan Emergency.

Soldiers surrounded the rubber estate at Sungai Rimoh in Batang Kali and shot dead 24 people, before setting light to the village. Commentators have described it as one of the most controversial incidents in British military history.

It has also been called “Britain’s My Lai massacre”, in reference to the killing of hundreds of unarmed Vietnamese villagers by United States troops in 1968.

Mr Halford said the official account of what happened was that the victims were attempting to escape when they were shot and “brought their deaths upon themselves”.

But he added: “The truth is that these people were killed ruthlessly in a series of what can only be described as executions by British troops, probably in reprisal for things that had happened earlier on in the Malayan Emergency, even though those killed weren’t responsible in any way for that.

“What’s happened ever since is that officials – essentially British officials – have conspired to maintain the official account and suppress that very basic truth that these killings were unlawful and could never be justified.”

Former defence secretary Denis Healey instructed Scotland Yard to set up a task team to investigate the matter while Labour was in power, but an incoming Conservative government dropped it in 1970, due to an ostensible lack of evidence.

Mr Halford said the reason for the termination of the inquiry would be revealed in the High Court hearing, which the families hope will lead to a public inquiry.

A Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) spokeswoman said: “This event happened over 60 years ago. Accounts of what happened conflict and virtually all the witnesses are dead.”

She added: “In these circumstances, it is very unlikely that a public inquiry could come up with recommendations which would help to prevent any recurrence.”

Three of the victims’ relatives, who were being taken away by lorries during the killings, described the massacre at an emotional press conference in central London.

Lim Ah Yin, 76, spoke of how the troops carried out a mock execution on her mother as they demanded information about the location of Communists.

Mrs Lim, who was 11 years old, also heard the gunfire which killed her father.

Loh Ah Choi, 71, heard his uncle being shot three times.

“I would like the British government to apologise,” he said. “I was about seven years old.”