Prince Harry was permitted to leave his Apache helicopter base on “urgent palace business” when it was put on lockdown for a spot drugs test, it has been claimed.
RAF Wittisham in Suffolk was reportedly secured by armed guards in May 2011 before all cadets, junior and senior, were ordered to give urine samples.
But the Duke of Sussex is said to have driven off in his Audi A3 to return to London, after having just come back from his brother Prince William’s wedding.
The now 38-year-old’s former Squadron Sergeant Major Mark ‘Oz’ Wilson, who was in charge of squadron discipline, told the Sun: “I couldn’t believe Harry was allowed to leave.”
There is no suggestion Harry purposefully skipped the test or that he took any drugs while serving in the Armed Forces.
Major Wilson, 50 — who has since left the Army — added: ‘He had just returned from a period of leave, from being off celebrating Prince William’s wedding.
“If you miss a test because you are not on camp normally you have to book a test ASAP at the next location you are going to.”
Harry is believed to have been the only serviceperson not tested on the base. He was serving with 656 Squadron, 4 Regiment Army Air Corps at the time.
An Army source added that it “would have looked very strange to his comrades”.
However, they said: “You can’t expect soldiers and sergeant majors to be aware of the diary pressures on the third in line to the throne.’
A Ministry of Defence Spokesperson said: ‘Every member of the Armed Forces is subject to compulsory drugs testing. We do not comment on individuals.’
MailOnline has contacted representatives for Harry for comment.
A year later, Harry graduated his Apache training and was deployed to Afghanistan, where he claims in his autobiography Spare to have killed 25 Taliban soldiers.
Colonel Tim Collins said Harry had been ‘badly advised’ when he compared the killing of insurgents to removing pieces from a chess board and said it was naive of the Prince to publicise intimate details of his two tours.
He told the Times: “The military has always embraced him into the family no matter what had gone on before.
“He’s now betrayed that trust. I think he’s completely naive. There’s no understanding of what he’s doing or what he’s done”.
General Sir Richard Barrons, a former Deputy Chief of the Defence Staff, told LBC: “My view is that you don’t talk about these things. These are things that happen on the battlefield and there’s no great advantage in saying anything public.”
Tobias Ellwood, chair of the Defence Select Committee and former British Army captain, added: “There should be no pride taken in scalps accumulated in any battles.
“From a security perspective, there is the unwritten assumption that nobody publicly discusses kill counts for the principal reason that it can have security repercussions.’
It comes as the Taliban yesterday branded Prince Harry a “big mouth loser” after he revealed he killed dozens of their fighters while serving in Afghanistan in his new tell-all memoir.
Speaking to MailOnline, the militants taunted the Duke of Sussex — who wrote that he viewed their fighters as “chess pieces” — saying they had had the last laugh over the West after recapturing the country in 2021.
The Taliban claimed while their fighters are the ultimate victors of the conflict, Harry had ‘fled to his grandmother’s palace’ and is now struggling to maintain a place in the Royal Family.
Harry, who was known as ‘Captain Wales’ in the military, wrote that he did not think of those killed “as people” but instead ‘chess pieces’ he had taken off the board.
“You can’t kill people if you see them as people’, he wrote. Instead, he said he saw them as “chess pieces removed from the board’… as ‘bad guys eliminated”.
Harry spent a decade in the British Army before taking up full-time royal duties in 2015. During that time, he did two tours of Afghanistan.
The prince was first deployed to Helmand province as a forward air controller in 2007, but his first tour of duty was cut short.
He returned in 2012, by which time he was responsible for firing a £45million Apache helicopter’s 30mm cannon and Hellfire missiles.
Spare is the first time that Harry, 38, has specified the number of insurgents he personally killed during his time in Afghanistan. The Prince said that he flew on six missions that resulted in the “taking of human lives” in his autobiography.
While many soldiers do not know how many enemies they have killed in combat, the Duke wrote that ‘in the era of Apaches and laptops’ he was able to say ‘with exactness’ the number of insurgents he killed.
In his bombshell memoirs, the Duke also admits to taking cocaine a ‘few’ times during his wilder party years.
Writing in the bombshell memoir, which has been released in Spain ahead of its publication in the UK next week, the Duke of Sussex describes being dragged into the office of an unnamed member of the Royal Household staff during his grandmother the Queen’s Golden Jubilee in 2002 after a journalist asked the Palace about his drug-taking habits.
Earlier in his autobiography, Harry describes smoking cannabis and boozing— but he has revealed for the first time how he was offered a line of cocaine during a hunting weekend.
Admitting that he lied to the Royal Household staff during his interrogation, Harry says taking cocaine “wasn’t much fun” and did it partly to be different and because he was a “seventeen-year-old willing to try almost anything that would upset the established order”.
According to translations obtained by MailOnline and also reported by Sky News, he writes: “It wasn’t much fun, and it didn’t make me feel particularly happy the way the others seemed to, but it did make me feel different, and that was my main goal. To feel. To be different.”
Harry also describes smoking cigarettes and cannabis, and drinking at the Windsor Castle golf course, while a student at Eton.
Tales of the Duke’s exploits as a ‘party prince’ have been extensively reported over the years. Speaking on Dax Shepard’s podcast in 2021, Harry laughed as he recalled his infamous party trip to Las Vegas which saw naked photos of him leaked to the press.
In 2012, Harry enjoyed a wild weekend in Las Vegas, where he was snapped in just a necklace while a naked girl hid behind him following a game of strip billiards in his VIP suite.
During Dax’s ‘Armchair Expert’ show, the royal was chatting about how people are more likely to run away and rebel after being told “you need help” when the host mentioned the notorious trip, joking: “[Or] take your clothes off in Las Vegas”.
Elsewhere in the book he claims he hallucinated that a bin was speaking to him after taking magic mushrooms.
Harry claimed the experience happened at a party with his friends.
The prince said they spied a box of mushroom chocolates in a fridge and decided to eat them before washing them down with tequila.
The trip did not go as intended however, with the duke ending up having a terrifying experience with a bin in the bathroom.
The Sun reported Harry as writing: ‘Beside the toilet was a round silver bin, the kind with a foot pedal to open the lid. I stared at the bin. It stared back. Then it became… a head.
“I stepped on the pedal and the head opened its mouth. A huge open grin.
“I laughed, turned away, took a p***. Now the loo became a head too. The bowl was its gaping maw, the hinges of the seat were its piercing silver eyes. It said, ‘Aaah’.”
It comes after the Duke of Sussex claimed that he and his brother begged their father not to marry the now-Queen Consort and that he wondered if she would one day be his “wicked stepmother”’.
Harry’s autobiography, Spare, reveals that the royal brothers were aware of Camilla as the “other woman”.
Kensington Palace and Buckingham Palace have declined to comment on the leaked claims from Harry’s book which emerged five days before the explosive, tell-all memoir is due to be published in the UK.
The book includes details of the moment he was introduced to Camilla for the first time.
The duke reportedly claims he and his brother had separate meetings with her before she married the now-King in 2005.
He said seeing her for the first time was like avoiding pain while getting an injection, writing: “This is nothing. Close your eyes and you won’t even feel it.” Harry also alleges that Camilla appeared “bored” during the meeting and thought about whether she would be his “wicked stepmother” in the future.
The book comes just weeks after Harry and Meghan’s bombshell Netflix documentary – in which Harry said he was left terrified when William screamed and shouted at him at a tense Sandringham summit in 2020.
It comes as MPs and military chiefs warned Prince Harry has undermined his own security and increased the risk of being targeted by Islamists in future revenge attacks.
Ex-Army chief Colonel Richard Kemp today warned that Harry’s admissions could cause pro-Taliban sympathisers to be “provoked to attempt revenge” against him and possibly ‘incite some people to attempt an attack on British soldiers anywhere in the world’.
The Duke — who is currently in a legal battle with the Home Office over security in the UK — also faces allegations that he wrote about his kill count in a tactical bid to get police protection when he visits Britain.
Royal expert Richard Fitzwilliams told MailOnline: “This may, of course, be a tactic to get the security he feels he needs when he visits Britain, but it is surely irresponsible. Who is advising him, one wonders.”
He added: “It also occurred to me that he might be using this highly unusual admission to pressurise the Home Office into granting him what he wants, either to pay for round-the-clock police protection when he is here, or, alternatively, to be favourably assessed for taxpayer funded security which he lost when he and Meghan stepped down as senior working royals.
“He is challenging the Home Office in court on this issue at the moment, the level of threat is assessed by the Executive Committee for Royalty and Public Figures (Ravec), which falls under the Home Office.
“He believes there was a threat from extremists and neo-Nazis ad claims his security had been compromised after an incident when he visited Britain in summer 2021. Now it could credibly be claimed there is a new threat.
“Harry could use this as a lever which could determine if he and Meghan attend the Coronation, always assuming the promised invitation arrives.”
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