“God led us to Lebanon and we knew that we might die,” Gary Witheral said after his 31-year-old American wife, Bonnie, was shot three times outside the pregnancy clinic she ran for Palestinian refugees in the port city of Sidon.

“I forgive anyone who did that. It doesn’t take the pain. It’s a costly forgiveness . . . it cost my wife,” Mr Witheral told The Times. “I loved her in our marriage. We had a really lovely marriage.

“I believe that the blood of Jesus died for us, for our sins, and it was the blood of Bonnie poured over the clinic for the Palestinian women of southern Lebanon. Her brains were blown out, you know. She loved those women.”

Mr Witheral, 36, was born in Plymouth and his family live in Crawley, Sussex. He left England to be a missionary when he was 20 and met his future wife at Bible school in Chicago. They were married five years ago and went to Lebanon two years later, working mostly with the Christian Missionary Alliance Church. “Bonnie was a lovely woman, a loving person and the women there loved her,” Mr Witheral said. “She was really able to touch people’s lives.”

Would she also have forgiven the killers? “Absolutely, absolutely,” he said. “We don’t care about the politics. We just wanted to put our arms around people and say ‘Hey, you know what? There’s hope’. The people of southern Lebanon are poor and suffering.”

The murder raised the threat of a new spate of attacks against Westerners in Lebanon, which was notorious during the civil war a decade ago for killings and kidnappings.

There had been particular fears in the Sidon area, where a militant Islamic group linked to Osama bin Laden has been operating. Christian missionaries have received verbal threats and last night expatriates in the area were reportedly being withdrawn.

The killing of Mrs Witheral was the latest in a series of recent attacks against American targets in the Middle East. Yesterday two American soldiers were shot and wounded by a traffic policeman in Kuwait. Last month an American diplomat was shot and killed in Amman. The US State Department issued a warning to Americans on Wednesday to expect further attacks.

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