Iraq hostages’ deaths raise questions

The discovery this weekend that two of the Britons kidnapped in Iraq in May 2007 had been dead for some time has brought accusations that the British Government has handled the situation badly.

After the bodies of two bodyguards, Jason Cresswell and Jason Swindlehurst, were identified, Graeme Moore, the father of Peter Moore, the IT consultant they and two other men were protecting, was highly critical of the Government.

"They haven't done anything," he told GMTV. "They should have been straight in directing negotiations right from the beginning." He added: "Unfortunately the way Gordon Brown and David Miliband have handled this case is bad news for the other two families. Miliband is a total waste of space."  

The Prime Minister Gordon Brown has responded to the accusation. "I can assure you that we have left no stone unturned in our efforts to release the hostages, to work with the Iraqi authorities to maintain our vigilance about what needs to be done," he said.

Moore and his four bodyguards, employed by the Canadian company GardaWorld, were overpowered by Shia militiamen in a raid at the Iraqi Finance Ministry in Baghdad.

In an unusually frank statement of solidarity, William Hague, the shadow foreign secretary, told the BBC he had no criticisms of the Foreign Office on this issue. "We may have many differences on other things," he said, "but I've been kept informed over the last 18 months of the very hard work that has gone on to try to free these hostages."

However, the Government is unable to say whether Moore and the other two guards - known only as Alec and Alan - are still alive and there remain serious doubts in some circles as to whether the Foreign Office has pursued the best course of action.

WHAT THEY ARE SAYINGDeborah Haynes, the Times: The news follows claims that Whitehall "bottled" an SAS mission to rescue another hostage, Edwin Dyer, earlier this month. Al-Qaeda militants executed the Briton in the Sahal region bordering the Sahara desert after saying they found that "Britain is unresponsive and does not seem to care for its citizens". In the case of the Baghdad five, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office has maintained it is working as hard as possible to secure the release of the whole group. It now looks like officials were out of the loop for months about the death of security guards Jason Creswell and Jason Swindlehurst.

Kim Sengupta, the Independent: Serious questions must be asked about the tactics employed by the British Government and also the role of GardaWorld, the company which employed the four bodyguards for Mr Moore... The company, it was alleged by a former employee, did not have a kidnap and insurance policy and this was revealed to the families of the hostages. The company also employed a public relations company to manage the bad news. Friends of Mr Moore who organised events to keep his memory alive say they had complaints from the PR firm. And GardaWorld is said to have played a part in shaping the British Government's policy of sparse publicity over the matter, a policy very different from the ones adopted over other abductions, such as those of Terry Waite and John McCarthy in Beirut, Norman Kember in Baghdad and Alan Johnston in Gaza.
 
Terry Waite, the Guardian: Would a public campaign have helped at this point? I think it unlikely. Certainly, a campaign helps families feel that at long last they are able to do something positive. On the other side, hostage-takers would hope that increased publicity would pressure the government into changing its policy on hostages. This raises the obvious question as to whether the policy of not giving way to certain demands made by hostage-takers is the correct one to follow. ·