Families of terror attack victims killed abroad criticize the Foreign Office for negligence

A number of families of terror attack victims who were killed overseas have criticized the Foreign Office for its unprofessional treatment with its response.

The families told The Guardian that they were told their relatives had survived when in reality they were dead.

Survivors Against Terror, a campaign group, will on Wednesday publish its findings based on interviews with 270 people who have been affected by terrorism.

The report found 49% of them described the support they received from the government and agencies in the country where the attack happened as poor or adequate. Support from the UK government wasn’t much better. A similar proportion of 46% said support was poor.

Jo Berry, a board member of Survivors Against Terror, o lost her father, Anthony, in the 1984 Brighton IRA bombing, said: “From older attacks like Bali to more recent ones like Tunisia, the Foreign Office has simply failed to provide the support the public would expect, and that survivors deserve”.

“We have heard consistent reports of unprofessional treatment, lack of capacity and even families being told their loved ones had survived when they hadn’t. It’s critical the Foreign Office listens to the voices of survivors and overhauls their approach to mass incidents affecting British citizens overseas,” she told The Guardian.

Maggie Stephens’s son, Neil Bowler, was murdered in the Bali 2002 bombing. “There were individual people in the Foreign Office who were good and quite caring, but as an organisational response it was poor,” Stephens said. “You don’t know what to ask and where to go. You are very isolated. Getting through to speak to somebody was dreadful. We were on the hotline for hours. We were relying on news reports.”

It was two months before the family was allowed to bring Neil’s body home. “Those two months were grim,” Stephens said. “We were in a huge state of shock and there was no information. Talking to others [who have been caught up in more recent attacks], it seems things have not got much better.”

Elizabeth McMillan was on the beach in the Tunisian resort of Sousse in June 2015 when a gunman killed 38 people, 30 of whom were British. “We were 20 feet from him when he started shooting,” she said.