Scot held hostage by Saddam Hussein hopes for justice
Charlie Kristiansson, an air steward from Uddingston, Lanarkshire, was among 385 passengers and crew on BA Flight 149 when it landed in Kuwait to refuel on August 2, 1990—despite British authorities having already been informed that Iraqi forces had launched an invasion.
The terrified hostages, including 11 children, were rounded up and used by Saddam's regime as 'human shields' at military sites. Many were starved, beaten, and sexually assaulted by their captors, reports the Daily Record.
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Kristiansson and others are now part of a class legal action accusing the UK Government and British Airways of knowingly endangering them.
The lawsuit alleges that Flight 149 was being used to covertly deliver a British intelligence team into the region under the cover of a civilian flight.
Charlie hopes the new Sky documentary Flight 149: Hostage of War will increase pressure on authorities to come clean after what he calls a 35-year-long 'cover-up.'
He said to the Daily Record: "The documentary is just another step in our harrowing journey. That flight was a Trojan horse. I want the Government and BA dragged into the courts and forced to tell the truth.
'The suffering was unbearable, and it was all avoidable. We were betrayed by the Government and I will never forgive them. I am furious.'
Charlie was 28 at the time, working aboard the London-to-Malaysia flight, tending to passengers as the plane prepared to depart after its stopover, when Iraqi jets began bombing Kuwait International Airport.
Explosions shredded the runway, and the crew rushed to evacuate passengers onto buses driven by fleeing Kuwaiti ground staff.
The Iraqi military soon rounded up the foreigners and took them to Kuwait City's Regency Palace Hotel, claiming they were to be 'guests of Iraq.'
On the way, Charlie saw the devastation of war—bodies abandoned among the rubble and twisted wreckage.
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Initially, the hostages believed the British Government and BA would intervene.
Charlie recalled: 'They offered us no help at all.
'We soon realised we were on our own.'
He and a group of other male crew members and stewardesses were taken to a derelict bungalow at Shuwaikh Port, which was covered in excrement and infested with flies.
They were terrorised by soldiers who warned them they'd be shot if they tried to escape. Charlie, who is 6ft 5in, saw his weight fall to just 6.5 stones.
In November, Charlie was taken from the group and moved to a missile base near Baghdad, where he was held alongside six Scottish air force pilots who were regularly tortured.
There, a kind Iraqi doctor convinced the guards to let Charlie go to a hospital, where he was finally able to phone his mother back in Scotland.
He said: 'It was like she was in the world of the living and I was trapped in hell with the dead.
'I felt I would never see her again.' After five months in captivity, the hostages were released in December 1990.
Charlie left British Airways after 13 years, disillusioned by what he describes as mounting evidence of the authorities' disregard for the lives on board Flight 149. He now lives in Luxembourg, teaching English.
Despite the trauma, he continues to campaign for the truth. It was revealed in 2021 that the Foreign Office had been warned of Saddam's invasion more than an hour before Flight 149 landed at 4.13am Kuwaiti time.
However, the Government denied that BA had been alerted, or that any intelligence team was aboard.
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In the documentary, Tony Paice, then-head of MI6 in Kuwait, claims he directly warned a senior British Airways official not to let the flight land.
Multiple passengers also recall seeing a mysterious group of 10 men board the flight—believed to be covert operatives—though their presence has never been officially acknowledged.
British Airways continues to state it received no warning.
Flight 149: Hostage of War airs on Sky Documentaries from Wednesday, June 11.
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