Five British hostages who were kidnapped from a Baghdad ministry 14 months ago are alive, a senior Iraqi official said yesterday, hinting that security forces may be closing in on their location.

“We have a very good, strong intelligence telling us they are alive, and we roughly know the area where they are,” Mowaffak al-Rubaie, the Iraqi national security adviser, told the BBC. “But we don’t want to be aggressive in our approach, not to risk their lives.”

Mr al-Rubaie did not elaborate on where he believed the hostages were being held, and British diplomats refused to comment on his claims.

The captives were seized in May last year when dozens of armed and uniformed men burst into the Finance Ministry compound in Baghdad where Peter Moore, a computer specialist from Lincoln, was giving civil servants IT instruction, under the protection of four as yet unidentified British security contractors working for a Canadian firm.

The men are thought to have been taken by a group calling itself the Islamic Shia Resistance, which American military officials believe is one of the Iranian-backed “Special Groups”.

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