Hostage's family on a knife-edge

By CAHAL MILMO

In a neat, red-brick house behind closely-drawn curtains in the Liverpool suburb of Walton, a mother, two brothers and a son could only wait, in despair and anger, for news to end their torment.

From early morning local time yesterday, the home of the Bigley family for the past 21 years had been the scene of frantic activity. Television crews had filmed dignified and powerful pleas for mercy and the Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, telephoned to offer reassurance that "everything possible" was being done.

By 2pm, Prime Minister Tony Blair himself had called, apparently stung by the angry criticism of a family desperate to do "something, anything" to influence events 4000km away in Iraq. He explained in turn to several of them the "limitations" on his ability to end their ordeal.

The family, then, were helpless. There was nothing to do but console each other, and await developments. When those came just before 7pm, mother Elizabeth, 86, brothers Stan, Philip and Paul, who was in Amsterdam, and son Craig, received them with a sickening sense of the bitter-sweet. For the Tawhid and Jihad group, linked to al Qaeda, had selected Jack Hensley, the fellow countryman of Eugene Armstrong, the American killed earlier this week, as its second victim.

Kenneth Bigley, 62, had been spared: but for how long, unless the murderers' demand for the release of all women prisoners was met.

It took the Prime Minister almost a week after Bigley's abduction in Baghdad to pick up the phone.

A civil engineer on his last project in Iraq before retirement this month, Bigley was kidnapped with his two American colleagues last Friday. All were employees of a Qatar-based construction company. The murderers promised to release a video-recording of Hensley's beheading, just as they had done 24 hours earlier of Armstrong's last moments.

It was not clear whether the execution of a second American would spur a "blinkered" Government, as the Bigleys see it, into action.

It seemed that the call from No 10 had taken place only after the Bigley family's rejection of the "stay calm, leave it to us" advice of the Foreign Office and instead laid bare to the cameras their impotence and fury.

Their anger and request for help focused on Blair, who 24 hours earlier, as the clock ticked on the kidnappers' first deadline, had helped to launch the new fast rail service from London to Manchester. Sitting in the lounge of his mother's home, Philip Bigley, a 49-year-old businessman, said: "We feel absolutely helpless. We do not have the power to save Ken's life. We have seen the Prime Minister spending time on trains that can help a commuter save 14 minutes on a journey when he should be devoting his time to saving the life of my brother."

Sitting beside his uncle, Craig Bigley, 33, who is due to make his father a granddad in February, added: "I ask Tony Blair personally to consider the amount of bloodshed already suffered. Please meet the demands and release my father, two women for two men. Only you can save him now." Downing Street, meantime, was silent as Bigley's plight threatened to crystallise opinion against the war. One poll found 71 per cent of voters wanted a date set for British troops to leave Iraq.

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Herald Feature: Iraq