I read recently that the British administration in Malaya before the Second World War was reckoned to be one of the worst run in the British Empire. As many of the same people were almost certainly back in the driver's seat in 1948 when a Scots Guards platoon massacred 24 ethnic Chinese rubber plantation workers, I find it very easy to believe. The whole affair is laced with a feeling of second-rate seediness. The facts behind the killing remain a state secret. Until very recently pompous former Scots Guards officers were quoted as insisting there had been no massacre. The High Court in London, ruling that Her Majesty's Government could not be forced to hold a public inquiry into the killings, said there was plenty of evidence that the rubber plantation workers had been murdered in cold blood. The official British version to this day remains that the men were shot while trying to escape after being rounded up for questioning about Communist banditry in the Batang Kali area. Only a fool would ever have believed that none of the suspects would have only been wounded rather than killed in the supposed mass escape. There was one survivor, who claimed he escaped death after fainting. Some have suggested there may be another reason that he alone among the adult males was not executed. The unofficial British line has long been that a mistake was made and the blame has been put on the soldiers in the patrol, mainly National Servicemen. It was some of these squaddies who confessed in the 1970s to being present at the massacre. The regular soldiers present stuck to the official version. The sergeant in charge later became a Regimental Sergeant Major and when quizzed about the killings appears to have been very confident that he would not be held to account for the massacre. What did he know and what is the British Goverment to this day so afraid of us finding out? I suspect that it is more than just that so many of the civil servants and senior military officers serving in Malaya at the time were such a bunch of sad-sack second raters.  
See Batang Kali Revisited