He may be the only man in the world to have been taken hostage by followers of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, watched a fellow captive beheaded, and survived to tell the tale.

Pale and gaunt, and chain-smoking, his eyes brimmed with tears and his foot tapped nervously on the floor of his home in the hillside village of Bednayel yesterday as he told The Times of his ordeal.

“I thank God I’m still alive, even though my life has been destroyed by what happened in Iraq,” he said.

Mr Raad was abducted on August 2 from a hotel in the insurgent stronghold of Ramadi, west of Baghdad. He was on his way to the Iraqi capital to become engaged to a cousin, but was bundled into a car by two masked men and driven 30 miles to Fallujah.

Blindfolded and bound by the wrists and ankles, he was given nothing to eat or drink for the next six days, despite blistering summer heat. His four captors, who never identified themselves or removed their masks, accused him of being an American agent.

“They beat me with their fists, rifle butts and metal bars,” he said. “All I could think about was having my head cut off with a knife. I thought how stupid I was to come to Iraq.”

On the sixth day he was passed to a second group of kidnappers who claimed to be members of the Islamic Movement of the Holy Warriors in Iraq, the Seif al-Islam Brigade. He was driven through the night to Samarra, another rebel town north of Baghdad, then into the desert near the Jordan-ian border.

As Mr Raad and his captors stood outside a cluster of mud huts, another car drove up. A man covered in bruises and dressed only in underwear was pulled from the boot. The group’s leader, known as the “Emir”, told Mr Raad that this was an Egyptian who had been caught helping the Americans to target insurgents in Fallujah.

The Emir then explained to him that he was about to witness the beheading of the Egyptian, whose name was Mohammed Fawzi Abdul Mutwalli, as a warning to all Lebanese not to work with the Americans in Iraq.

“They took me into one of the huts. The floor was covered with dried blood and it reeked of death. The Emir told me that this is where they slaughtered their captives. The man who was to kill him was known as ‘the butcher’.

“He sharpened his knife on a stone as they prepared the Egyptian. They dressed their victim in a white gown and he then identified himself and confessed to his ‘crime’.”

At the end of his confession he recited the Shuhada, a prayer used by Muslims who hope to enter Heaven.

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