MoD May Compensate Kenyan Mine Victims

The Ministry of Defence is considering paying compensation to more than 200 Kenyan tribespeople who say they have been maimed by mines and bombs left after recent British army exercises, it emerged today.

MoD officials are refusing to admit liability but have agreed to negotiate with lawyers with a view to working out a settlement.

A total of 220 people who have lost limbs, and bereaved relatives, are claiming compensation from the British government, BBC Radio 4's Today programme reported this morning.

British regiments train in Kenya for several months each year but people who live near the training grounds say they have been careless about cleaning up afterwards.

Martyn Day, the Kenyans' London solicitor, said the MoD had told him that they would make an offer that he hoped would be substantial, the BBC reported.

An MoD spokesman told Guardian Unlimited that a meeting had taken place with the Kenyan's lawyers yesterday and negotiations were "ongoing".

He said there were strict regulations for clearing up explosives but "a small percentage of unexploded munitions may not be located initially". There was a scheme, he added, to locate and remove them and that the Kenyan authorities cooperated with keeping people out of dangerous areas.

The Liberal Democrat defence spokesman, Paul Keetch, told the programme that he was not surprised by the action and said it was another "classic MoD blunder".

Mr Keetch said: "This is the latest in a whole series of cases where the Ministry of Defence has ended up paying large amounts of compensation.

"It does seem to me that the MoD have an ethos of denying responsibility, taking it to the wire, then capitulating, and then having to spend a great deal of taxpayers' money in paying compensation. "We need to understand why it is that we have in many ways the best trained armed forces in the world, yet consistently they seem to have civil servants that frankly let them down time and time again."

In February, the MoD admitted that a tax blunder may have deprived thousands of ex-soldiers pension payments going back as far as 80 years.

The error concerned invalidity pensions where a soldier's injury or illness was suffered in the line of duty. The payments should have been tax-free, but were not.