Phillip Hammond
Foreign Secretary
Parliamentary House of Commons
London SW1A
27th
October 2014
Dear Mr Hammond
Less than 48 hours before Mr Fletcher’s
court hearing this afternoon, Conor Doherty confirmed that Mr Fletcher’s
passport “was cancelled and destroyed by the
British authorities” and that “we can write to confirm this.”
This morning I wrote
the following to Nigel Eustace:
Dear Nigel
I wonder if you will be present at Mr
Fletcher’s hearing at the Phnom Penh Municipal court this afternoon?
If so, I trust that you will bring with you
a letter addressed to the judges explaining that the Foreign & Commonwealth
Office accidentally sent Mr Fletcher’s valid passport to the UK, cancelled and
then destroyed it!
As the Foreign & Commonwealth Office was
well aware, at the time of this ‘accidental’ cancellation and destruction took
place, Mr Fletcher’s contained relevant to his court case.
The proposition that the pages of Mr
Fletcher’s passport were not photocopied prior to the series of accidents that
led to its disappearance off the face of the planet beggars belief!
best wishes
Mr Eustace did not
turn up at court and did not provide a letter for the court. Could you please
provide a letter for Mr Fletcher’s next court appearance? Expressed in simple
everyday words and not in impenetrable bureaucratese. Signed by yourself,
please Mr Hammond.
I would like to
approach the disappearance of Mr Fletcher’s passport from a different angle in
order to illustrate why it is that I do not believe for one moment that Mr
Fletcher’s passport was destroyed by mistake. Imagine the following:
It transpires that
Mr Fletcher is, in fact, a pedophile who has been traipsing around the world
leaving a trail of young victims in his wake. One of these young victims
happens upon a story about Mr Fletcher and tells the police in his country:
“That is the man who raped me in on Sept 16th 2002.” The police
contact the British authorities and ask for any information the FCO may have on
Mr Fletcher’s travels in Sept 2002. Would the Foreign & Commonwealth Office
respond with: “We are dreadfully sorry but we destroyed Mr Fletcher’s passport by
accident and have no knowledge at all of his movements during the decade
preceding its destruction. We don’t make photocopies of the travel itineraries
of suspected terrorists, pedophiles and other criminals. Sorry.”
No, of course not.
Any British citizen who is suspected of
being a terrorist, a pedophile or a criminal of one kind or another is
monitored. Nothing they do, nowhere they go, goes unrecorded. We all know this
and to pretend otherwise is nonsense.
Let’s bring this
even closer to home. Let’s say that the Lao authorities approach the FCO in Oct 2014 and say that a young girl has come
forward who claims Mr Fletcher raped her on 15th and 22nd
March 2009. These authorities are requesting of the FCO any information it
might have of Mr Fletcher’s movements in March 2009. Would you, as Foreign
Secretary and the person on whose desk the buck eventually stops, seriously be
prepared to inform the Lao authorities that the FCO is unable to respond to
their request because Mr Fletcher’s passport was destroyed?
Please, Mr
Hammond, will you please handing this matter off to the likes of Sue Bennett, Conor
Doherty and Nigel Eustace to deal with. This requires the attention of someone much
higher up the FCO bureaucratic ladder.
I will ask the
same questions of you, Mr Hammond, that I asked of Ambassador Mark Kent, in
hopes of honest answers:
1. On what date did the British
Embassy cancel Mr Fletcher’s passport?
2. Why did the British Embassy cancel
Mr Fletcher’s passport?
3. Who made the decision to cancel Mr
Fletcher’s passport?
4. Was Mr Fletcher’s cancelled
passport then destroyed?
5. If so, why was the passport
destroyed?
6. Who was responsible for the
destruction of Mr Fletcher’s passport?
7. If both the cancellation of the
passport were accidental, why was Mr Fletcher not provided, immediately, with a
new passport free of charge?
8. It is the normal custom in the UK,
when a passport is cancelled, that the corners and the front page are removed.
Why was this procedure not adhered to but, it seems, the entire passport
destroyed?
9. Is it legal for any person,
including those working within a British Embassy, to destroy the passport of a
British citizen?
10. Before the British Embassy
decided to destroy Mr Fletcher’s passport, were the pages within it photocopied?
The dates of Mr.Fletcher’s travels in and out of both Thailand and Cambodia up
to and including the dates of the alleged rapes is relevant to his legal
position vis a vis the Phnom Penh Municipal court.
10. Given the seriousness of the
charges laid against Mr Fletcher and the relevance of the dates of his travel
in and out of both Cambodia and Thailand it is hard to imagine that copies of
the pages of his passport were not made prior to its destruction. Will Mr
Fletcher be provided with copies of these pages?
When Mr Fletcher
is released from prison his first act as a free citizen will be to initiate an
investigation into the theft and destruction of his passport in order to find
out precisely who gave the ‘destroy’ order. At present this person (or group of
people) are being protected by those further up the bureaucratic ladder. Such
protection may not be easy to achieve if an independent investigation is
conducted.
Let me add here
that the fate of Mr Fletcher’s passport is not only important evidence in relation to his movements in March 2009
vis a vis the alleged rape of Yang Dany. It’s disappearance and the dates upon
which various decisions were made about its fate (and by whom) are also
relevant to another question to be resolved one day in court:
“Why did the British embassies in Cambodia and
Thailand, working with Scott Neeson, a gaggle of investigating NGOs and the
Thai authorities, play such a proactive role in the pursuit and prosecution of
David Fletcher?
Broadly speaking there are two possible answers:
(1) The FCO had
(or believed it had access to) very strong evidence that Mr Fletcher was guilty
of ‘grooming’ and rape. If so, it was not the FCO’s job to play prosecutor and
judge.
(2) Certain people
within the FCO were friends of Scott
Neeson’s and others involved in pursuing Mr Fletcher with scuttlebutt, rumour
and innuendo and threw their hat in the ring to ‘get Fletcher’. Petty,
vindictive, bully-boy behavior of a kind not uncommon in Cambodia amongst the many
misfits, mercenaries and missionaries that gravitate towards this lawless
country.
Unfortunately, the
narrative that was agreed upon by all involved in nailing Fletcher necessitated
that he be in Cambodia in March 2009. Merde! He wasn’t! His passport bears
witness to this fact! What to do! “I think an accident is in order,” one can hear
Sir Humphrey intoning, trying desperately to maintain narrative coherence.
best wishes
James Ricketson
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