Britons taken hostage in Iraq

After the bodies of two Britons, Jason Cresswell and Jason Swindlehurst, were identified last weekend, the fate of the three other British hostages who were seized at the Iraqi Finance Ministry by a gang of militiamen in May 2007 is still unknown. Nobody can say for sure whether IT consultant Peter Moore and his bodyguards, who are known only as Alan and Alec, are alive or dead.

Iraqi insurgents have been targeting foreign nationals since early 2004. Since then, 200 have been abducted, and around 30 killed. These are the best-known British cases:

Ken Bigley The 62-year-old civil engineer (above) was taken hostage, along with two American colleagues, in September 2004 by the Tawhid and Jihad group, which was led by Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and had links to al-Qaeda. The Americans were executed after a week. After this, a huge public campaign, centred around Bigley's home town of Liverpool, took shape. Shortly before his death, Bigley managed to escape for half-an-hour with the help of a guard, but he was recaptured, blindfolded and videoed with six armed and hooded men. One of them spoke to the camera in Arabic, demanding the release of Iraqi women prisoners held by the US-led invaders, before cutting his throat.

Margaret Hassan Only weeks after Bigley's killing, 59-year-old Hassan (above), a British-Irish aid worker, was seized in Baghdad. She had moved there in 1972, married an Iraqi and worked as head of Care International, a charity which looked after slum children, and provided medicine to leukaemia victims. A video was released which showed Hassan pleading for Tony Blair to remove troops from Iraq, and hundreds of Iraqis protested about her kidnap, but though the Al-Jazeera television network has videos which may show her execution, little is known for certain about how she died. An Iraqi man, Ali Lutfi Jassar al-Rawi, was sentenced to life imprisonment for his part in her murder, but Hassan's body has never been recovered.

Gary Teeley Other British nationals taken hostage in Iraq have been more fortunate. Teeley, a father-of-five from Woolwich, south-east London, was a consultant for a laundry firm based in Qatar. After agreeing to briefly fill in for his best friend, who wanted to return home to see his newborn son, Teeley was working in the southern Iraqi city of Nasiriya in April 2004 when he was snatched by a gang of heavily armed men. During the six days he was held captive he was badly beaten, but after heavy fighting between the kidnappers and local militia, Teeley was released and handed over to Italian troops.

James Brandon A young freelance journalist looking to make a name for himself as a reporter out in Iraq. In August 2004, 30 or so gunmen burst into his room at the Diafa hotel in Basra. After capturing Brandon (above), he was beaten and pistol-whipped, and forced to endure a number of mock executions. He briefly managed to escape to a nearby government building, after holding a woman at knife point, but was then recaptured. His kidnappers started to treat Brandon better after they found out that he was a journalist, and he was released when Moqtada al-Sadr, the radical cleric and leader of the Mahdi Army found out about his capture. "We apologise for what happened to you," said a spokesman for al-Sadr. "This is not our tradition, not our rules. It is not the tradition of Islam."

Philip Sands The freelance journalist from Dorset had been embedded with the 3rd Infantry Division of the US Army, but decided to set off alone. On his way to an interview in Baghdad in December 2005, the 28-year-old found himself surrounded by ten Sunni militiamen wearing ski masks and wielding AK-47 rifles. He was held captive for five days, until, by chance, a team of US soldiers on a routine early morning mission to seek out insurgents, came across the house he was being held in. No one had even known that he was missing.

Richard Butler Late one night in February 2008, a group of armed police burst into a room at the Sultan Palace Hotel in downtown Basra where British photojournalist Richard Butler (above) was staying, while on an assignment for CBS news. His assailants turned out to be Iranian-backed Shi'ite militants who held him hostage for two months, until a patrol from the Iraqi army, acting on a tip off, found him, his head covered by a black bag, and fought off his guards. ·