IRAQ: The Thai wife of British hostage Mr Kenneth Bigley, threatened with execution by captors in Iraq, issued a tearful plea for his life yesterday.
"I pray for your mercy now and beg you to release Ken so that I may be with him again and so that he may also be reunited with his family in England," Mrs Sombat Bigley said in a statement she read to reporters.
"My husband Ken is an ordinary, hard-working family man who wanted to help the people of Iraq, amongst whom he has made many friends. As a loving wife, I beg you once more for mercy."
Two Americans taken from a Baghdad house at gunpoint with the 62-year-old Bigley have been beheaded and the British engineer was shown on a grainy video pleading for his life.
"I don't want to die. I don't deserve it," he said in an appeal to the British Prime Minister, Mr Tony Blair, to accede to his kidnappers demands for the release of all women in Iraqi jails.
Mrs Sombat Bigley, sitting in the garden of a Bangkok house, her eyes puffy from weeping, said she had been married to the Briton for seven years but gave no other details of their life together. "I desperately want to be re-united with my husband," she sobbed. She said she had decided to talk to reporters, who had been trying to track her down since her husband was taken, after seeing her husband's video appeal. The couple live on a mango farm in northeast Thailand.
Ms Cherie Blair, the prime minister's wife, also spoke of the crisis yesterday: "My heart goes out to them (the Bigley family) at this terrible time and I'm sure everyone in Britain feels the same.
The family seized on a video posted on the Internet, in which Mr Bigley was shown alive, traumatised and begging for Mr Blair's intervention, to make a direct plea to the kidnappers: "You have proved to the world that you are committed and determined. Be merciful as we know you can be," they said in a statement released from their Liverpool home. The Foreign Minister, Mr Jack Straw, hailed the family's "courage and forbearance" but said any concessions would encourage a wave of kidnappings and render Iraq even more dangerous than it already it is. - (Reuters)