To ask the Secretary of State for Defence if he will investigate the circumstances in which the 1972 direction on the use of hooding, referred to in paragraph 19 of the Aitken report on Cases of Deliberate Abuse and Unlawful Killing in Iraq in 2003 and 2004, came to be lost in 2003. (178773)

The question of how the direction following the publication of the “Directive on Interrogation by the Armed Forces in Internal Security Operations” in 1972 came to be lost is likely to be addressed in any future inquiry into the death of Mr. Baha Mousa. I refer the hon. Member to the written ministerial statement I made on 25 January 2008, Official Report, column 65WS.