British Malayan headhunting scandal
The decapitation of suspected MNLA members was subsequently found to have been a common and widespread practice by British troops in Malaya that had been sanctioned by Gerald Templer.
It was also found that the British military had hired over 1,000 mercenaries from Iban headhunting tribes in Borneo to fight in Malaya with the promise they could keep the scalps of the people they killed.
This led to the British colonial secretary Oliver Lyttelton to openly confess in the House of Commons that the Daily Worker's headhunting photographed were genuine.
[5] Privately commenting on the Daily Worker photographs, the Colonial Office noted that "there is no doubt that under international law a similar case in wartime would be a war crime".
[6][7] In response to the scandal, Prime Minister Winston Churchill (serving his second term 1951-1955) and his cabinet agreed to order British forces to stop the practice of decapitating guerrillas in Malaya.
In the House of Commons, Labour Party MP Michael Stewart asked the Minister of State for Colonial Affairs, Henry Hopkinson, if the British government intended to punish soldiers posing for photographs with decapitated human heads.
[18] Wen-Qing Ngoei, a history professor whose research focuses on anti-communism in Asia, attributed the practice of headhunting to racism and Lyttleton's public relations spin among other factors as successfully "drowning popular aversion to beheading communists with yellow faces"[19] In 2023 a history of the scandal was published titled Head Hunters in the Malayan Emergency: The Atrocity and Cover-up.
