Tortures

Britain’s secret ‘torture camp’ and the stench of a cover-up: How the brave men who protested about prisoners being abused at a UK base in Cyprus were shunned... until now

It was a clear October night in the hills above Kythrea and 19-year-old Jamie Eykyn was settling in for a long and uneventful evening. Standing sentry before a single-storey Army complex in the Cyprus countryside, the young Grenadier Guards officer had little to see and nothing to hear except the swish of the Mediterranean breeze through the olive groves.

Until, that is, the night air was pierced by sounds that still chill his blood today, six decades later – agonised screams from the men held prisoner in the building he was guarding: a British interrogation centre.

This was 1958 and EOKA terrorists were mounting an armed insurgency in their fight for Cypriot independence from colonial rule and, as Lieutenant Eykyn would discover to his horror, Britain’s response was uncompromisingly brutal.

Now aged 79, Mr Eykyn is speaking for the first time about the horrific events of 60 years ago – and about the shameful cover-up that followed.