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Hostage tells of torture hell
Former hostage Peter Moore spoke in detail about the torture he suffered at the hands of his kidnappers during his two-and-half year ordeal.
In newspaper and television interviews, he described the moment he feared he had been shot dead when his captors staged a mock execution, as well as the cramped and lonely conditions he was kept in.
Mr Moore, 36, who's mum lives in Thornton and was released in December, also expressed regret he did not carry out a briefly-considered plan to kill one of his captors.
The computer expert was abducted with his four bodyguards in Iraq in May 2007.
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 discussed killing a guard at an early stage of the ordeal by injecting him with air - before deciding it was too risky.
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.
Mr Moore and the other four men were seized from a finance ministry building in Baghdad by militants posing as police.
In an interview with The Times, Mr Moore described the moment he was bundled into a truck, saying: "At first, I thought I was under arrest for a document infringement.
"Then they started taking off my clothes and throwing them out of the window.
"That's when I thought, 'No, no, this is an abduction'."
He also revealed how he and the four bodyguards were last together in Basra in July 2007, when he and and Mr McMenemy were taken to a building thought to be in Hilla.
By December, Mr Moore had been separated from Mr McMenemy and went on to spend the next two years on his own.
Some captors forced him to lie for weeks on mats or subjected him to torture such as hanging him from a door by his handcuffs, while others let him watch television, according to the paper.
Mr Moore found his own ways to cope with the ordeal, sometimes turning to his imagination to keep going.
"I would pretend that I wasn't there," he said. "I pretended I was in a bike shop negotiating which motorbike to buy.
"There were also dots in the paint on the wall. I would pretend it was an underground system and the dots were stations. I had to link them up using the least amount of track and the least number of trains."
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