Jason Smith verdict follows mother's 10-year fight for truth from army

Catherine Smith has spent decade trying to discover details surrounding her son’s heatstroke death in Iraq

In the early summer of 2003 Jason Smith, a 32-year-old mechanic who had spent 10 years in the Territorial Army, was told he was going to be deployed to Iraq.

According to his mother, Catherine, he was excited as well as nervous.

“He always wanted to serve his country and felt ready for the challenges ahead,” she said. “He felt he was going out to Iraq to help the people.”

On 13 August the knock on the door that all next of kin fear came. A TA family officer broke the news that her son had died while serving in southern Iraq. “He had very little information but said so far as they knew he died from the heat. It hit me like a tonne of bricks,” said Smith.

She and her son had realised he could die in action but not in circumstances like this, which felt avoidable.

Smith has spent the past decade trying to get to the bottom of what happened. An inquest held three years after he died found serious failings in the way the army had protected soldiers from the heat of southern Iraq. But vital documents were not provided and Smith felt details were being withheld.

She and her legal team campaigned for a new inquest – and helped force a supreme court ruling that gave British soldiers the same right to life, safeguarded by the Human Rights Act, as any other citizen.

The fresh inquest, which has taken place in Oxford, has been made all the more pertinent by the tragedy of the three TA soldiers who died while taking part in an SAS test on the Brecon Beacons in south Wales on one of the hottest days of the summer.

Smith has expressed concern that lessons about how soldiers should operate in heat may not have been learned in the 10 years since her son died. The case has also focused attention on the fitness of TA soldiers – an important factor at a time when the government is planning to beef up the role of reservists.

Jason Smith was sent to Iraq attached to the 1st Battalion the King’s Own Scottish Borderers in June 2003. The soldiers were operating in gruelling conditions with temperatures rising to over 50C.

Late in July 2003 Smith wrote his last letter to his mother telling her he had been so dehydrated that medics could not find a vein to put a drip in.

The following month he was found lying face down in an old athletics stadium where he was stationed. He was taken to hospital but suffered a cardiac arrest and could not be saved.

In 2006, the first inquest found his death followed a serious failure on the part of the army in not recognising the difficulty he was having adjusting to the climate. Concerns were raised over the fitness of TA members prior to deployment, the information card …read more