Blindfolded, handcuffed and chained by one ankle to a metal grille over a window, Peter Moore lay motionless on a mat on the floor. Every limb in his body ached through lack of use and his mind fought against despair. “I would pretend that I wasn’t there. I pretended I was in a bike shop negotiating which motorbike to buy,” said Mr Moore, describing how he got through the lowest point of his kidnap ordeal, chained up in a small room with four guards in a house he believed was in Basra, the main province in southern Iraq. “There were also dots in the paint on the wall. I would pretend it was an underground system and the dots were stations. I had to link them up using the least amount of track and the least number of trains.”

For a man who spent most of the past three years at the mercy of a highly trained group of Shia kidnappers, Mr Moore appears remarkably well, cracking jokes and laughing as he describes even the most traumatic moments, from torture and mock executions to making hostage videos. “That felt a bit strange,” he said of the first time he was filmed. “It was to Tony Blair and his Government. [I said] I’m OK, we are doing well. We need to do an exchange.”

Mr Moore, 36, an IT consultant, and his four British guards were kidnapped from a compound in Baghdad by scores of men in Iraqi security force uniform, driving police vehicles — an operation that he believed was conducted with the knowledge of the ministries of interior and/or finance. “They were Iraqi resistance. They have representation in the Government,” he said, dismissing a suggestion that the group, which calls itself the League of the Righteous, was instructed by Iran’s Republican Guard. “The only Iranian link is that there is an interest in Iran, probably covert funding by Iran,” he said, adding that there was also a strong influence from Hezbollah, the Iranian-funded Lebanese guerrilla organisation.

Describing the moment when he was bundled into one of the pick-up trucks, Mr Moore said: “At first, I thought I was under arrest for a document infringement. Then they started taking off my clothes and throwing them out of the window. That’s when I thought, ‘No, no, this is an abduction’.”

Mr Moore and his guards, Jason Swindlehurst, Jason Creswell, Alec MacLachlan and Alan McMenemy, were driven in a convoy to Sadr City, a Shia slum in the east of Baghdad. The vehicles stopped. They were forced, in their underpants, on to the street and then into a Range Rover.

“Jason Creswell has got blood coming out of his head, all the others are handcuffed with that plastic kind of tape,” he said. “For some reason, the police officers smashed the glass between the driver’s compartment and our back compartment, so glass goes down my leg and all down the back of Jason Creswell. That’s where I got my only injury.”

The men were driven to a house and led into a room where Mr Moore’s glasses — he is short-sighted — were taken. It was the last time he was able to see clearly until his release. “They started pouring water on us. I asked Alan why, is it a torture thing or to keep us cool? They did it to me again some time later, pouring water down my back as punishment. I remember at the time shouting ‘Oooh, ahhh’ even though it was actually really nice because the weather was so hot.”

Mr Swindlehurst was led away and a shot sounded. “Alan and Alec have a conversation about whether he has been shot. They conclude no because apparently you would have heard a gurgling sound,” Mr Moore said. Then it was his turn to be taken outside. “That was scary. I thought, ‘I am going to get killed’. They walk me down some stairs and halfway down I hear a gunshot.” It was the first of a number of mock executions for Mr Moore. The initial day in captivity ended with the men being put into false compartments in two trucks and driven for hours along rough roads, stopping at night so their captors could sleep, before driving for much of the next day.

His account of events contrasted with a report last year in The Guardian that claimed the men were taken to Iran within the first 24 hours and held there. “We could hear a train and there were loads of mortars going off around us, loads of explosions,” said Mr Moore, adding: “It definitely wasn’t Iran.”

US military intelligence, however, has assessed that the men spent some time in Iran. Mr Moore, who was never officially told where he was held, conceded that the vehicle may have crossed Iraq’s border into Iran and back during the drive, but insisted that he and the other guards ended up in a house in Basra. He also said he spent time in houses in Baghdad as well as Hilla and Karbala, two cities to the south of the capital. He was unable to vouch for the whereabouts of the guards, who were eventually killed.

The outcome could have been very different. Mr Moore recalled a moment when he, Mr Creswell and Mr MacLachlan debated whether to kill one of two men who were guarding them. “I remember saying, no we shouldn’t do it,” he said, believing it foolhardy if they were in a militia-controlled area. “With hindsight, I wonder whether we should have had a go.”

Mr Moore last saw everyone on July 8, 2007, in Basra before he and Mr McMenemy were taken away. The pair spent the next five months chained side-by-side in cramped rooms dressed in tracksuits and with only a television for comfort. At one point, they passed the time by making model men out of bits of plastic explosives that they found all over the carpet.

The two men were separated in early December and Mr McMenemy, who fell ill with vomiting and diarrhoea, endured the next two years on his own. Some guards would force him to lie for weeks on a mat, sitting up only to eat and standing only to go to the toilet three times a day. Others were more kind, letting him watch television and extending the chain attached to his ankles to let him walk. He was not allowed to watch news channels until his final months. Instead he tuned in to Oprah Winfrey and the TMZ entertainment programme, where he learnt that Barack Obama had become President and Michael Jackson had died.

Convinced that they had captured a military intelligence officer and four US soldiers, his captors interrogated Mr Moore for hours; they refused to believe that he was just an IT consultant. Wanting to appeal to their respect for family and religion, he invented a wife — a Brazilian malaria doctor called Emma DaSouza, weaving such an imaginative plot that he almost began to believe it himself. He also pretended he was Catholic. His act was so convincing that his kidnappers gave him a string of Islamic beads to pray with — though he almost gave himself away, uttering a prayer of “Hell Mary”.

As the months stretched into years, Mr Moore tried to talk to the less menacing guards, forging a particular bond in early 2009 with a major who spoke quite good English and ordered that he no longer be kept in chains. The two men watched tennis together on television. One day the major appeared with two table tennis bats and a ball. “We got quite fast, playing for hours at a time. It was a good laugh,” said Mr Moore. Throughout his ordeal the kidnappers made clear that they wanted a prisoner exchange, the five British hostages for several of their leaders who had been arrested by British forces in Iraq but were being held by the US military. “I just knew we were in it for the long haul,” he said.

The atmosphere began to change towards the end of 2008. His living conditions improved, he was given his own room free of guards and satellite television. He was also encouraged to exercise for an hour and a half a day. But he began to suspect that the other four hostages were dead.

In June of last year, the first breakthrough happened when Laith al-Khazali, one of the main members of the group held in US detention, was released. Over the next few months, more prisoners were set free. In return, the bodies of three of the dead guards were returned to the British Embassy in Baghdad. Mr Moore, however, knew the only chance he had of freedom was if Qais al-Khazali, the main remaining prisoner, was also released — something that finally happened, much to his disbelief.

On the morning of December 30 last year, he was woken at 5am and told to get dressed in a new pair of jeans and black top because he was going to be released. Mr Moore refused to believe them. “I was just like, ‘Go away’ and put the blanket over my head.”

The guards insisted and reluctantly he went with them. He was bundled into the back of one car, transferred into a minibus, then into a white car and finally driven into a driveway where he was met by a large group of Iraqi men in suits and others in combat gear with machineguns. “I thought, ‘S***, I am going to die’.” Suddenly a man stepped forward and introduced himself as Sami al-Askari, an Iraqi MP. Mr Moore recalled that he said: “I am from the Iraqi Government and you are a free man.”

He still refused to believe what was happening until he was taken to the embassy and even then felt safe only once he was out of Iraq and back in Britain.

Revealing details of the work that took place behind the scenes to secure his release, Mr Moore said that a British general and a second British official met Laith al-Khazali about 20 times while he was a prisoner. He acknowledged, however, that the British Government never had the power to secure his freedom, which was always contingent on the US military releasing prisoners — something that would always have happened whether or not he and the other four guards had been kidnapped.

“The guys said to me that taking hostages was only one of the things they were doing,” Mr Moore said, referring to conversations with the kidnappers. “They were also in discussion with the [Iraqi] Government, killing American soldiers and carrying out mortar attacks on US bases.”

Two months on, Mr Moore is preparing to return to Guyana to catch up with friends before heading to New Zealand on a motorcycle tour. He has no plans to return to Iraq.