A TOP Manchester cop and his young daughter were held in a `diabolical' Cuban hospital for FOUR days - because airport officials thought she had swine flu.

Det Chief Insp Pete Marsh, 47, spent £4,000 treating his wife and two children to a dream holiday. But it became a nightmare when a thermal camera showed daughter Bethany, 12, had a high temperature. She was rushed to a ramshackle hospital - with Pete insisting he went along too.

They were put in a room with bars on the windows and no running water - and forbidden to leave.

They only got out when Pete, of the Wythenshawe major incident team, told staff they would have to arrest him to make them stay. Now they are back at their hotel with the rest of the family - but claim the holiday has been ruined.

"The conditions were absolutely diabolical," Pete, from Stockport, said from Cuba.

Frightened

"It has been a terrible experience. Bethany was really frightened the first night because of the way they responded even though there was nothing wrong with her. She kept asking: ‘Am I going to die?’ We weren’t ill when we came but we could have been as a result of the conditions in there.”

The drama began when the family landed at Holguin airport and Bethany was detained. Pete said: “Everyone who met our flight was wearing green face masks.

Doctors rushed over and said she would have to be taken to hospital for tests. She’d just had a bad flight and wrapped herself up in a blanket. We were quarantined in a ward which looked like it was from the 1950s.”

Pete says Bethany’s temperature was back to normal the following day. But they were told to stay until doctors could rule out swine flu – which could take days.

Yesterday, Pete decided enough was enough. He said: “I said they’d have to arrest me to keep us there because my daughter had hardly eaten anything for days and I was worried about her health deteriorating.”

They went to the Playa Pesquero hotel in Holguin, where wife Marian and daughter Sarah, seven, were waiting. But they have been warned Bethany, a Stockport Academy pupil, will have to go back to the hospital if the swine flu tests prove positive.

Flu pandemic

Pete added: “People who are coming to this country, and Britons going abroad generally, need to know that this is what could happen to them even if they’ve just got a high temperature or a cold.”

No one from the Cuban Embassy in London was available to comment. Hundreds of British nationals have faced quarantines abroad since the outbreak of the swine flu pandemic, including two from Greater Manchester.

Rochdale student Farhan Malik, 17, was kept in an Egyptian hospital for a week after airport officials mistook his fear of flying for swine flu. And Glen Mullan’s family, from Wigan, were held at a Turkish airport for three-and-a-half hours before being quarantined in their hotel room for a day under similar circumstances.

A spokeswoman for the Foreign Office said government guidance warned travellers to Cuba that they could face ‘a period of hospitalisation while blood tests for the H1N1 virus are undertaken’.

But the Department of Health said holidaymakers to Britain faced no such restrictions. Visiting foreigners with suspect swine flu are not quarantined and are treated with the same anti-flu drugs as UK residents.

A spokeswoman for holiday firm Thomas Cook said: “We sympathise with the Marsh family’s situation.  Our reps have been in daily contact with them and have taken food and personal belongings to the hospitalto make their stay as comfortable as possible.

“Mr Marsh and his daughter have now been discharged from hospital and we hope they can enjoy the rest of their holiday.”