A MUTILATED body discovered in Fallujah a fortnight ago was not Margaret Hassan, the missing British aid worker believed murdered earlier this month, British sources in Baghdad said yesterday.

Although DNA testing has yet to be completed, dental records prove that the body was not Mrs Hassan’s, leaving her exact fate still uncertain.

The Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, will celebrate a Requiem Mass for her at Westminster Cathedral on Saturday next week. The Catholic Church said yesterday that despite reports that she had converted to Islam, Mrs Hassan remained a churchgoing Roman Catholic.

The cardinal’s office said: “No body has been found, and the family do not expect it to be found, which is why this is a Requiem Mass rather than a funeral.”

Mrs Hassan’s husband, Tahseen Ali Hassan, told The Times yesterday that he did not know if she was dead or alive. “There is only a video suggesting the execution to show that she is dead, and I don’t know if that is a hoax or not,” he said.

The grainy video received by al-Jazeera television channel in mid-November shows a blindfolded woman in an orange boilersuit being shot. The British Ambassador in Qatar and one family member concluded that it most probably did show Mrs Hassan’s killing. But others in Iraq, including her husband, cling to the slim hope that she may still be alive.

“In my mind she is still alive,” he said. “Maybe I’m wrong, but I was with Margaret for 33 years. I cannot believe she has been abducted and killed.”

The kidnapping, in Baghdad on October 19, was unusual. No group admitted holding Mrs Hassan, 59, and no contact was made with her kidnappers. In a series of videos, she voiced varying demands which were unlike those made by the hostages of Iraq’s most wanted terrorist, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, head of al-Tawhid wal Jihad.

The bodies of other hostages who have been beheaded have been dumped in public places. Mrs Hassan’s has not. Al-Zarqawi’s group posted a message on a website denying that it had held her.

Two weeks ago, US Marines clearing Fallujah found the body of a woman in her fifties with her legs and arms cut off and her throat cut. Initially, diplomatic sources, including John Howard, the Australian Prime Minister, said that the body was Mrs Hassan’s and it was sent to Jordan for DNA testing.

However, a senior Iraqi officer in the serious crime unit in Baghdad insisted that al-Tawhid wal Jihad had held Mrs Hassan. “She was in Fallujah and right from the beginning of her kidnap we knew Zarqawi was holding her,” he told The Times on condition of anonymity. “Al-Zarqawi’s website message and the other strange video details were just a deception.”

Patterns in the fate of Western hostages are difficult to establish. A market exists for captives to be taken by a criminal gang and then traded, sometimes several times, among groups with political agendas.

Nor is death certain, even for coalition citizens. A Polish woman, Teresa Borcz Khalifa, of a similiar age to Mrs Hassan and also married to an Iraqi, was held in the Fallujah area at the same time by the Salafi Brigade of Abu Bakr al-Siddiq, another resistance group.

Demands were made for the withdrawal of Polish troops in Iraq in return for her life. The Polish Government refused any deal, yet Mrs Khalifa was released unharmed on November 20 and said that she had been well treated.

For Mr Hassan the motives of his wife’s captors remain just an academic exercise.

“I have appealed to them so many times just to give me back my wife dead or alive,” he said. “I can only repeat it again now. If she is dead I want her back to rest in the ground.”

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