News Search Search this site or the web powered by FreeFind Site search Web search Story archive		March 9, 2004, Tuesday, Scotsman CURRENCY OF THEFT THE ONLY ONE VALUED IN BASRA Gethin Chamberlain IN Baghdad, it was the museums: everything had been looted, the staff said, everything was gone. In Basra, it was the banks. Desperate to get their hands on cash, people were prepared to risk their lives to empty the vaults. But when British soldiers turned up to try to put a stop to the looting, they suspected that everything was not quite as it seemed. Whenever soldiers turned up at one of the city's seven banks, the manager would tell them that millions of dinar had been taken. There was only one solution they could think of: if the money was going to be disappearing anyway, the best thing to do was to remove it to a central point where it could at least be put to good use getting the country back on its feet. It meant that individuals would lose their savings, but the way Basra was going in the days immediately after the end of the war, they were likely to lose them anyway. Accompanied by the Royal Engineers, Captain Alec Brown turned up at the first of the four banks he had been ordered to look after. Unable to gain access by any other means, they drilled through the walls of the vaults. "On boring into the first vault it was empty, but the manager insisted there was 370 million missing. And there was a lot of that," said Brown. "The sums we took out were in the sums of billions of dinar and millions of dollars and we decided the best thing to do with the money was to centralise it in brigade. "Every time we went into a bank there was always something missing; the old manager would claim there was more money in the bank than we ever took out, so during the fog of war a lot of money had gone missing. Mostly dinar but quite a lot of US dollars. "We would be constantly catching people daily and taking tens of thousands of dollars off people. It would be nothing to walk into the old camp that we stayed in and there would be piles and piles of dinar or dollars lying there. "That was all shipped up to brigade to be given back to the people. People's claims are ongoing but our priority was to secure the money. They were getting robbed anyway; robbery was 24 hours a day and it was becoming a big burden on a very small army. They found they liked to steal, and they were willing to risk their lives to steal." For some, the desire to get their hands on ready cash would cost them their lives. "There were a few shot, and not because they were stealing but because we tried to stop them and they opened fire on us and they couldn't understand the perception of night sights and how good the snipers were. But that didn't put them off. "There were three laddies came out of the bank, two turned round to open fire on the Black Watch sniper group. Those two were killed immediately and the third guy didn't fire back and he was arrested. "They were up for a fight for some dinars, though they were worth very little at that stage. Local businessmen were telling people that the dinar was going down so they would buy their dinar off them. There were a lot of sharks going around."
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