[Surely this is illegal under islamic law (ringing porno lines)-ed]
It certainly was not part of Britain’s plans to win the hearts and minds of the people of Iraq. But the Foreign Office has been apparently paying for an adult sex chatline in a Baghdad street for 17 months without knowing it.
The Foreign Office has had to tell MPs that an investigation into how a diplomat lost two satellite phones in Iraq has nothing to do with terrorism but more to do with a budding entrepreneur and a telephone porn network.
FO officials had already admitted that the lost phones had cost them £594,000 in unauthorised phone bills but it is now bracing itself for an extremely critical report from the Commons public accounts committee on how it came to pay phone bills, which at one stage hit £212,000 in one month, without asking questions.
Sir Michael Jay, permanent secretary at the FO, told MPs: “All the pattern of usage of these phones … points to some kind of criminal activity … It was almost as though they were taken and used as a kind of mobile phone booth at the end of the street where anybody could come along and use them.
“After that, they appear to have been used for a couple of scams based on what are known as personal numbers and premium numbers.”
Sir Michael said the premium rate numbers were used for betting agencies or adult phone lines, and that one of the FO phones had been “on virtually full time with the person who is, as it were, making the call getting some benefit from it.”
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