Press Association
Saturday 11th February 2012
Former hostage Peter Moore has described the moment he thought he had been shot dead when his captors staged a mock execution.
The computer expert, who was abducted with his four bodyguards in Iraq in May 2007, was released in December after two and a half years in captivity.
The bodies of three of his bodyguards - Alec MacLachlan, 30, from Llanelli, South Wales, Jason Swindlehurst, 38, from Skelmersdale, Lancashire, and Jason Creswell, 39, originally from Glasgow - were passed to UK authorities last year. A fourth bodyguard, Alan McMenemy, 34, from Glasgow, is also believed to have been killed.
Mr Moore, 36, from Lincoln, told Channel 4 News about the moment he was blindfolded and a gun fired behind his head.
He said: "They handcuff me behind my back, blindfold me, walk me out into another room, and they kneel me down. They cock a pistol. They put it to my head.
"They pull the trigger and at the same time they fire a gun off behind my back. Obviously, I thought the gun had gone off. I remember very clearly, I sat there with my hands behind my back. I was blindfolded looking down... I remember thinking... 'OK, I'm dead'."
He also spoke of the moment he and a fellow hostage considered killing a guard at an early stage of the ordeal by injecting him with air - before deciding against it.
"The issue was, fundamentally, could we inject that guy, get up, disable the other guy, get next door, get a pistol, come back, shoot the other guy and get out?" he told the programme.
"There was a bit of umming and aahing about it. I said 'I'm a hindrance' and ultimately what I was concerned about was getting out of the frying pan into the fire, in that there's two in here, but probably a hundred of them outside. But he said, with hindsight, they should have tried.
"I think it was the best chance we had and we should have gone for it," he said. "I think the worst-case scenario is that one or two of us would have been killed and one would have made it out."
