IT WAS ten days ago that rumours began circulating in Baghdad that Margaret Hassan had been murdered, but it was not until last Thursday that a video of her killing was given to the Arab satellite station al-Jazeera.

The station decided not to broadcast the film. Instead it contacted British diplomats who sent a specialist team to the network’s headquarters in Qatar.

At first the experts could not be sure it was Mrs Hassan who could be seen blindfolded and kneeling on the floor before being shot with a pistol at point blank range.

One official who has seen the tape said: “Mrs Hassan appears to know she was about to die.” She was not allowed to say anything before she was shot in the head with a single bullet fired by a masked man.

Only when the diplomats were sure of the tape’s authenticity did they tell her husband, Tahseen Ali Hassan, that the 59-year-old aid worker was dead.

Last night Mr Hassan made one final, anguished appeal to her captors to return her body so that he can bury her.

Nobody yet knows which group kidnapped her or where it held her, but there was speculation last night that the American and Iraqi operation to crush the insurgency in Fallujah might have precipitated her death. “We feared for Margaret when we had reports a week ago that she was being held in the area around Fallujah,” a Western diplomat involved in the efforts to free her said.

Until yesterday, her family and colleagues from CARE International, the charity for which she worked, had clung to the knowledge that none of the eight foreign women hostages taken in Iraq had been harmed.

That belief was shaken on Sunday night when US Marines in Fallujah found the remains of what they believe was a Polish woman hostage. Her body had been dismembered and disembowelled. Mrs Hassan’s family were assured it was not her, but what they did not know was that she too had been killed.

“It is impossible to say if the US-led attack on Fallujah was the reason for her murder, because her executioners make no speeches, nor give any reasons for killing her,” the diplomat said. “Whether they were trying to escape the fighting and decided to get rid of their hostage or this was their wicked vengeance we may never know.”

In the first hours after Mrs Hassan was snatched from her car as she drove to her Baghdad office on October 19, colleagues were convinced she would be released once her captors realised who she was.

She was different from the other foreign hostages. She was a Muslim woman who described herself as an Iraqi. Although she had British, Irish and Iraqi citizenship she had lived in Baghdad for more than 30 years with her husband and was working for an aid agency which had a proven record of helping Iraqi families.

Behind the scenes influential figures swiftly offered to act as intermediaries. Senior clerics and tribal sheikhs made their revulsion plain as they used contacts to try to reach her captors. Diplomats in Baghdad and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office agreed to say as little as possible in public. Officials were determined to avoid a repeat of the scenes witnessed while Kenneth Bigley was held hostage, when some of his relatives appeared on television blaming Tony Blair.

A Scotland Yard team was sent to Baghdad while British diplomats stayed in close touch with Mr Hassan and her family in Britain and Ireland, pleading with them not to say anything provocative. Whatever governments and others said in public about refusing to do deals with kidnappers, go-betweens made clear that they were willing to pay.

Within hours of her capture a video was released of Mrs Hassan with her hands bound behind her back. She said nothing. CARE’S response was to halt all its operations and send its staff home while her husband made the first of his dignified appeals. Colleagues stressed how she had condemned the UN sanctions regime and the US government.

On October 22 a second video showed her weeping and pleading for her life. On October 27, she is seen on film pleading for British troops to be withdrawn and for aid workers to leave. Within hours CARE said it had pulled out of Iraq.

Her sisters broke their silence after her captors threatened to hand her over to the notorious Abu Musab al-Zarqawi who has never freed a hostage. Then al-Zarqawi made an unprecedented call for her to be freed which raised the hopes of her family and friends.

Their optimism was finally extinguished by the three-minute video of her murder.

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