UK News
Focus: Countdown to murder - A Sunday Times Report on the Ken Bigley Execution
By
Oct 11, 2004, 10:40

A Sunday Times article by Tom Walker and Stephen Grey at

http://www.timesonline.co.uk

Hopes were rising, and beneath the clatter of helicopters overhead the British embassy in Baghdad was a hive of activity. By last weekend delegations of every hue and colour had arrived with messages of support for Ken Bigley, the engineer held hostage by a bloodthirsty terrorist gang.

Two specialist negotiators, dispatched by Scotland Yard, had joined the efforts of diplomats to find Bigley and secure his release. A Muslim delegation from Britain was calling its contacts among Iraqis. MI6 officers in Baghdad were seeking informants who might betray Bigley’s captors, the Tawhid wal Jihad group led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian terrorist.

Then came the breakthrough that everyone had been hoping for: on Monday news arrived of contact. A man claiming to be an intermediary for the group was at the entrance to Baghdad’s Green Zone, in which the British embassy stands.

A radio message was sent to the American soldiers manning the security barriers known as Assassin’s Gate. In the shadow of an Abrams tank the emissary was searched and then driven by armoured Land Rover to the embassy, a drab one-storey building in a compound studded by date palms near the banks of the River Tigris.

He was ushered through the high brown protection walls and zig-zagged through the maze of “blast baskets” that stand up to shoulder height. Watched over by Gurkhas, he was finally brought into the building.

Establishing any link with a group of the most ruthless killers on the planet had proved extraordinarily difficult, but now word spread that a channel had opened up. After two weeks of despair it seemed that a deal might be possible.

In Britain, John Scarlett, head of MI6, was monitoring the case. GCHQ, the government eavesdropping centre, directed satellites to scour the airwaves around Baghdad for communications that might give clues to Bigley’s whereabouts. An SAS unit stood ready to move.

“When the prime minister said everything possible was being done to secure Bigley’s release,” said one diplomat, “he meant that everything possible was being done, every possible resource was mobilised.”

IT WAS more than two weeks since Bigley, 62, had been taken from his home in the prosperous Al-Mansour district of Baghdad, one of the few areas where westerners dare to live. His age and experience in the Middle East had helped Bigley to feel invulnerable, and he moved freely in his street, helping local Iraqis to take an electricity feed from the house that he shared with two American engineers.

He was carefree and generous: not that that mattered to al-Zarqawi’s group, which snatched the three westerners at dawn, at gunpoint, on September 16.

Eugene Armstrong and Jack Hensley, the two Americans, were beheaded within days, their murders shown in grainy videos beneath the black banner of Tawhid wal Jihad. The men, kneeling, blindfolded and clearly terrified, gave their names and confessed to working for the coalition: behind them their hooded captors demanded the release of all women prisoners in Iraq.

Bigley seemed to have a different currency for the group, probably because he was British. He was kept alive and deployed by the terrorists in videos designed to put extended political pressure on Tony Blair and the government. His plight and the impassioned, dignified pleas of his family for his release generated a national outcry.

Although the government stuck to its line that there could be no deal done with terrorists, all sorts of efforts to help Bigley swung into action.

The Foreign Office called in Scotland Yard where Peter Clarke, deputy assistant commissioner and head of the anti-terrorist branch S013, dispatched two of his most experienced negotiators to Baghdad.

The operation was personally overseen in London from the fifth floor of New Scotland Yard by David Venness, the assistant commissioner who is the national terrorism co-ordinator.

MI6 and GCHQ weighed in and British Muslim leaders made strenuous efforts.

“We were in and out of the embassy and we saw that there was a lot of activity going on to make contact with the captors,” said Musharraf Hussain, one of the two envoys from the Muslim Council of Britain who flew to Baghdad.

“The embassy was trying to make contact with local people in various areas. We held a series of meetings with religious leaders, some of whom were even loyal to Moqtada al-Sadr (one of the most radical and rebellious Islamic figures).

“We also held a meeting with leaders of Iraq’s Islamic party, which is known to have an influence with al- Zarqawi’s group.”

Much of the Bigley family’s campaign, meanwhile, was sparked by the tireless efforts of Bigley’s brother Paul. An engineering contractor living in Holland, he spent sleepless days and nights in his Amsterdam flat constantly on the telephone and in e-mail contact with anyone who took an interest.

He enrolled the Irish government in his campaign, clutching at the hope that his brother’s right to an Irish passport (their mother Lil, 86, was born in Ireland) might persuade al-Zarqawi to let him go.

Al-Jazeera, the Arabic television station, helped as much as possible, giving airtime for the many pleas that he generated, including one from Bertie Ahern, the Irish prime minister.

As the days ticked by Paul Bigley’s quest continued and by the start of last week Colonel Muammar Gadaffi, the Libyan leader, and his son Saif were also on board. So, too, were Terry Waite, Yasser Arafat and other international figures.

Although the government sometimes appeared to be uncomfortable with Paul Bigley’s efforts — he was outspoken in his criticism of Blair — inside the embassy a twin-track approach developed.

One plan coalesced around Gadaffi, who during the past five years has helped to pay secretive ransoms for the release of western hostages held in the Philippines and Algeria.

The idea was that Gadaffi’s charity, the Gadaffi Foundation run by Saif, would put up money for Bigley’s release with much of the ransom earmarked for medical clinics in towns loyal to al-Zarqawi. Ahern, Arafat and others would all make carefully orchestrated appeals as part of the same approach.

At the same time messages were being passed back and forth through the mysterious intermediary. “Given what we were dealing with, we were prepared to listen to any approach,” said one exhausted diplomat.

Details of exactly what the Scotland Yard negotiators did are still unclear, but it is likely that they helped to craft the messages sent to al-Zarqawi. Blair then personally approved them. On Tuesday Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, made a whirlwind visit to the embassy.

In public, diplomats in the embassy remained cautiously positive. Two Italian hostages, Simona Pari and Simona Torretta, had been released the previous week and the tribal leaders involved in that handover appeared confident that the same trick could be pulled off with Bigley.

Four hundred Iraqis had been enlisted by the embassy, said diplomats, to help to distribute leaflets in areas around Baghdad where it was believed that the local population was increasingly sickened by al-Zarqawi’s brutal tactics.

A 40-second radio appeal for Bigley to be saved was made with the help of the BBC studio in Baghdad and the embassy arranged for a translation of the distraught words of Bigley’s mother, who had already twice been hospitalised because of the stress of the ordeal.

For the first time in months the embassy staff felt that they were really making links with ordinary Iraqis, all through the extraordinary Bigley affair.

Privately, however, diplomats and security experts in the inner circle of negotiations were beginning to have their doubts. Although the intermediary was still being brought into the embassy, he kept repeating al-Zarqawi’s demand that women allegedly taken from their homes in rebel towns such as Falluja should be released.

The negotiation — if it could ever have genuinely been called that — stalled as again and again the British explained that they were holding no women prisoners. They showed the intermediary a Red Cross document to prove their point, to no avail.

PAUL BIGLEY always held to the belief that his brother, with his infectious Scouse humour and experience of the Middle East, would be able to talk round his captors. Even when Ken Bigley was filmed crouched in a cage delivering his penultimate, desperate appeal to Blair to help him, his brother insisted that in reality “Ken is sitting up in a chair, cracking jokes with them, having a rapport”.

Perhaps he almost did. Insurgent sources in Falluja said last night that Bigley, with the help of up to two of his captors, made a bid for freedom. One version has it that, disguised in Arab robes, he was driven away in a car but quickly stopped. In another he is said to have fled across farmland near the town of Latifiya, southwest of Baghdad on foot only to be recaptured before he reached a main road.

Latifiya is a mixed town of Shi’ites and Sunnis, but since last year extreme Wahhabist Sunnis have reportedly moved in — driving out many Shi’ites, assassinating their leaders and killing or threatening anyone who co-operated with the Americans or the new Iraqi government.

The account of Bigley’s escape — which may have presaged his murder — surfaced at first from rebel forces in Falluja, who appeared to wish to justify his killing. But other Iraqi officials reported that civilians in Latifiya saw resistance fighters setting up road blocks.

British intelligence sources cannot corroborate the reports. And whether Bigley did taste brief freedom or not his prospects, to many observers, always looked grim.

Al-Zarqawi, fast becoming a hero to Muslim fanatics as much as Osama Bin Laden, has never released a foreign hostage yet. He has now beheaded 10.

The end, when it came, was typically brutal. On Thursday the intermediary arrived at the embassy and simply said that Bigley had been killed. As officials strove to corroborate the news, Bigley’s family was warned to expect the worst.

On Friday a video sent to Abu Dhabi television finally confirmed what millions around the world had feared. Bigley had been dressed in the now familiar orange jumpsuit that the terror groups use to mock and terrify the West; he had been filmed making one last appeal and then, while three men held him down, one of his captors cut off his head.

The aftermath will be tricky for Blair to navigate, although many people accept that governments must not succumb to terrorist blackmail. This, and the condolences offered to the Bigley family by Straw, who spent more than an hour at their home in Walton, Liverpool, may be enough to mitigate criticism about the continuing chaos and savagery in Iraq.

Philip Bigley, 49, the youngest brother, said that the “government had done everything it possibly could to secure the release of Ken in this impossible situation”. But Paul Bigley is likely to remain an awkward customer. “I’ve got to digest the whole thing, but I’m pleased Ken lived as long as he did,” he said before he flew to join the family in Liverpool yesterday.

“I’m worn out and Ken’s gone: we now have to prepare a big send-off. I haven’t a clue what will happen: my mum has taken it remarkably well and I’m just trying to be myself. But we were nearly there and I’ve got my own ideas as to what happened.”

He is likely to add his voice to the anti-war demonstrations planned for later this month and yesterday, even in his grief, he hinted that he believed that American insensitivity had contributed to his brother’s demise. “They’re bloody trigger-happy chappies,” he said.

The Muslim Council of Britain also criticised the American military for not easing its activities. “They were not helping at all,” said Hussain. “They increased the bombing of Falluja, which would only have increased the captors’ anger. I felt the Americans did not care.”

Other observers suggested that the Americans’ pursuit of a former senior member of Saddam Hussein’s regime may have played a part. Izzat al-Douri, a Saddam henchman who is still on the run, is believed to have sworn allegiance to al-Zarqawi. American forces arrested his wife and daughter, which may have played a part in al-Zarqawi’s demands for all female prisoners to be released.

In a statement the Gadaffi Foundation also suggested that Bigley’s final days were handled badly, but it pointed the blame more at the British, whom it implied had given too much emphasis to negotiating through the mystery mediator. “The foundation’s efforts stopped 48 hours before Ken Bigley’s execution based on a British request,” it said.

Whatever the precise details of Bigley’s final hours, one thing remains clear. Al- Zarqawi is not a man of mercy. His aim is brutally simple: to terrorise the foreigners helping to build a democratic Iraq into fleeing.

Last week a report by the Iraq Survey Group noted that al-Zarqawi’s gang is probably linked to attempts to produce chemical weapons for use against coalition forces. If successful, it says, the threat could be “devastating”.

Already the effect of the beheadings is evident, as Khaled Abbas, a spokesman for the company that employed Bigley, Armstrong and Hensley made clear. Sounding shaken by their fate, he admitted that his company was not taking on any new work in Iraq and would like to leave the country if possible.