Soldiers due to spend Christmas with their families after six months in Iraq were dumped 400 miles from home at Prestwick Airport on Christmas Eve, The Herald has learned. Their civilian charter flight from the Middle East was ordered to divert from its intended destination at RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire because of fog.

The 130 troops aboard had already spent 36 hours in transit from Basra because the Ministry of Defence-chartered aircraft was nine hours late in arriving to pick them up due to unspecified "technical problems". But instead of finally arriving at the military airfield near Oxford and being bussed to their home bases in nearby Wiltshire, they found themselves in Scotland on Christmas Eve with no arrangements in place to transport them south.

Despite having 15 hours' notice of the delay and diversion, RAF movements staff claimed they had not received orders to make onward travel arrangements and that no coaches were available.

They eventually issued rail warrants and left most of the the soldiers, still wearing desert combat uniforms, to find their own connections from Prestwick. After protests, the others had to wait another three hours until coaches were found to drive them to England - arriving at Brize Norton at 5am on Christmas Day.

One soldier said: "We were originally flown by Hercules transports fitted with anti-missile defences from Basra to the onward transport hub at al Udeid in Qatar. We arrived there to be told that the outbound flight to Brize was delayed by at least nine hours.

"It was the beginning of the trip from hell. The RAF had made no arrangements to look after us in Qatar. It took the intervention of a brigadier on the flight to force the local movements staff to lay on transit beds so we could at least get our heads down.

"We were then woken up to be told that the homeward flight would be diverted to Prestwick because there was fog at Brize, but that onward transport from there had been laid on in advance."

He added: "The flight took eight hours, at the end of which we passed above a cloudless and fog-free southern England, overflying civilian airports and military bases at Stansted, Luton, Brize, Birmingham, and Manchester before arriving 400 miles from home at a gloomy and overcast Prestwick.

"The charter pilot told us that the MoD had made the decision not to allow the flight to go to Brize as intended, even though it was possible to file a new flight plan en route when the fog cleared.

"The biggest blow is that neither the RAF nor the Army took corporate responsibility for getting blokes home after a tour in Basra. It hardly honours the military covenant, particularly at Christmas, when public transport is already booked out.

The RAF said: "Diversions are infrequent and decisions are taken by a tri-service movements organisation. Every effort is obviously made to minimise disruption to personnel returning from Iraq or Afghanistan.

"But we can't control the weather, and sometimes it is necessary to re-route flights on safety or other grounds. We have no knowledge of the specific incident, but will investigate if complaints are made through the participants' chain of command."

The MoD has spent more than £37m on civilian charters to and from al Udeid since 2004. According to its own figures, out of 132 flights from Qatar to Brize Norton in 2005-06, 20 were delayed, two were cancelled, and one diverted.