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Colonel Tim: The truth behind those shocking war crimes allegations

News that the greatest British soldier since Wellington has been accused of abusing innocent members of the Iraqi Republican Guard has sent shock waves round the world.

Fiercely objective newspapers including the Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph have already made it abundantly clear that the whole thing has been cooked up by a bunch of simpering Yanks and their corrupt Eye-Racky buddies.

Colonel Nasty But Tim Collins shot to fame with his inspirational address to troops preparing to liberate the oil wells of Iraq. In the speech — a copy of which President Bush has attached to the White House fridge with little magnets and intends to get around to reading some day — given just before his men went into battle he bellowed: "We come not to conquer but to liberate."

However, he apparently later added: "And if any raghead so much as looks at you sideways, then kill the fuc*ker." Unfortunately, TV crews had already moved on to film a doe-eyed Iraqi child with no arms and legs, so no record of this Nelsonesque oratory remains. Tim's 5,000 troops, meanwhile, psyched up by this rousing call to arms, stormed to overcome the 35 Iraqi defenders of Um Qasr within a fortnight.

During the battle, a few pesky kids — and an old woman with a offensive-looking falafel — were declared "legitimate" targets by Timbo and vapourised. Later, Collins himself allegedly acted in an aggressive fashion towards the enemy, at one point waving his gun about a bit. At the time there seemed to be no problem and Collins made space on his camouflage tunic for the expected VC and bar. But only weeks later, the natural born killer was to realise that there is no place in modern warfare for such reckless and potentially life-threatening behaviour.

The initial allegation was made by Mustafa chemical-weapon-round-here-somewhere al Tikrit, a respected member of the local Ba'ath Party in Basra ("sort of like the Rotary Club"), who filed a detailed report with the local RSPCA. A UK friend of the Iraqi — a Mr G Galloway of Glasgow, Streatham, and the Algarve — has already vouched for the chap saying: "He's a lovely man, a really lovely man. I salute his indefatigability in the face of western imperialism."

As soon as British officials were made aware of the complaint the smooth machinery of military moral rectitude swung into action. Staff at the Ministry of Defence have made it clear that the allegations will be "scrupulously investigated" to help regain the confidence of the local population. "Only then can they be dismissed," a man re-enacting Bloody Sunday with hundreds of miniature plastic bog trotters on a baize-topped table told The Rockall Times.

And, as beautifully-rendered 1/72 scale Paras opened fire on the aggressive Republican mob rampaging across the table before us, trained teams of army counsellors in an adjacent room used their pistol butts to sympathetically tease a key witness statement from a Iraqi militiaman.

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