It is 20 years since the kidnapping and murder of Walton-born Ken Bigley in Iraq
Today, October 7, 2024, marks 20 years since Ken Bigley, 62, was murdered in Iraq by Islamist militants, three weeks after being kidnapped from his home. Anyone who was around in 2004 will remember the images vividly. The sadness and horror of seeing Walton-born Ken plead for his life on camera. The unspeakable cruelty of his captors. The bravery and dignity of his family back in Liverpool, who never stopped fighting for him.
It was a story that captivated and horrified a nation deeply divided over the war in Iraq, which was launched in March 2003 by a US-led coalition. The death of an ordinary man in such terrible circumstances brought home the horror of war to the British people – especially the people of Merseyside. It also triggered a huge media storm over crass comments made about Liverpool in the Spectator magazine – then edited by Boris Johnson.
On the anniversary of Ken’s death, the ECHO looks back on that awful time to examine what happened and to pay tribute to the man at the centre of it all.
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Ken Bigley was the oldest of four sons brought up in Walton by their parents, Lil and Tom. After attending Birchfield Road Secondary Modern, Ken did his national service and married his first wife, Margaret. He then trained as a civil engineer, working overseas in Australia and New Zealand, before returning to Merseyside, where he bought two supermarkets in Hoylake.
In 1986 came a moment that changed everything for the young family: the death of Ken and Margaret’s son Paul. Paul, 17, died after being hit by a lorry as he cycled to a nearby bank to deposit his pocket money. The tragedy hit Ken hard. He and Margaret divorced, and after a brief stint in Spain, Ken decided to go further afield.
He began work in the Middle East with an engineering company based in the UAE. This work eventually led him to war-torn Iraq, where, to remind him of home, his family would send him copies of the ECHO so he could keep up with Everton’s results. Ken planned to stay in Iraq for a few months before retiring to Thailand with his new wife, Sombat.
The kidnapping
Working on reconstruction efforts with the Iraqi Electricity Ministry, he moved to a house in the wealthy expat enclave of Mansour in Baghdad. It was a city already sliding into chaos as the Iraqi insurgency took hold.
On September 16, 2004, Ken was at home with his American colleagues Jack Hensley, 48, and Eugene Armstrong, 52, when al-Qaeda-linked militants armed with Kalashnikovs entered the property and kidnapped the three men.
When news broke that the engineers had been kidnapped, a media frenzy grew around Ken’s family in Walton. In a 2015 interview with the ECHO, Ken’s younger brother Phil said they tried to shield his mum, Lil, from the worst of it.
Phil said: “We perhaps did the wrong thing at the time, we wrapped her up in cotton wool, overprotected her, turned the TV off and only listened to the police and Foreign Office. We all came round to protect her and she just sat and prayed – it was a testing time for everybody.”
The news coming out of Iraq was a steady flow of horror. Two days after the kidnapping, the militants released a video of the three men kneeling in front of a Jihadi banner. They said they would kill the hostages unless Iraqi women prisoners held by coalition forces were released. On September 20, they murdered Eugene Armstrong, and the following day, Jack Hensley suffered the same fate.
The Bigley family gather their strength
Ken was now alone in captivity. Over the following three weeks, the story dominated newspaper headlines and filled the airwaves in an era where the internet was still in its infancy and social media hadn’t fully taken off. Video-sharing sites were growing in popularity, however, and people pounced on anything extreme and upsetting.
On September 22, another hostage video was released, this time showing Ken alone, pleading directly to then-Prime Minister Tony Blair to help save him.
The Bigley family gathered their strength and tried everything in their power to bring him home safely. Ken’s son Craig made a public plea to the prime minister, saying, “Only you can save him now. You have children and you will understand how I feel at this time.”
It soon developed into a major crisis for the Blair government. The prime minister’s hands were tied by the UK’s long-held policy of refusing to negotiate with hostage-takers and terrorists. Ken’s brother Paul said at the time: “Ken is there shivering with fear, but he is alive. It is sickening to hear Blair say that he won’t deal with terrorists.”
Religious leaders, entertainers and politicians from across the world, including the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, Yasser Arafat and Irish Prime Minister Berti Ahern, appealed to Ken’s kidnappers to show him mercy. Joint prayer sessions were held in Liverpool by Christian and Muslim leaders.
It was all in vain, however. On October 7, 2004, after 22 days in captivity, Ken was brutally beheaded. It later emerged that there had been a botched attempt to rescue him. According to reports from the time, he briefly managed to escape with the help of two MI6 agents, but was subsequently recaptured at a checkpoint and taken back into captivity.
Ken’s death led to a huge outpouring of grief on Merseyside. An evening mass was held for him at the Catholic Metropolitan Cathedral and people came from far and wide to lay flowers and light candles outside the Bigley family home in Walton.
Johnson’s words cause deep upset
One week later, the conservative-leaning Spectator magazine published a deeply insensitive editorial claiming that the “extreme reaction” to the tragedy was fuelled by the fact Ken was from Liverpool. It said Liverpudlians “see themselves whenever possible as victims, and resent their victim status; yet at the same time they wallow in it”.
Making explicit reference to the Hillsborough tragedy, it said the city of Liverpool failed to acknowledge “the part played in the disaster by drunken fans at the back of the crowd who mindlessly tried to fight their way into the ground.”
The piece added: “The police became a convenient scapegoat, and the S*n newspaper a whipping-boy for daring, in albeit a tasteless fashion, to hint at the wider causes of the incident.”
Boris Johnson, then editor of the Spectator, came to Liverpool to apologise in person for the remarks. He apologised again to the city in 2013, but this was rejected by the chair of the Hillsborough Family Support Group. Margaret Aspinall, whose son James died at Hillsborough said: “No, his apology doesn’t mean a thing to me.”
‘A pain that never goes away’
When media interest surrounding Ken died down, the Bigley family were left alone with their grief. Compounding their pain was the fact that they didn’t have a body to bring home and bury.
Ken’s brother Paul worked tirelessly for many years trying to locate Ken’s body, spending £140,000 of his life savings to bring him back to Liverpool. Paul went as far as tracking his remains to a small patch of land near Baghdad, but political instability made it impossible to go further. To this day, Ken’s body has not been found.
Ken’s mum died in 2015 at the age of 97, never having laid her son to rest. Speaking to the ECHO at the time of her death, Ken’s brother Phil described his mum’s pain at losing her eldest son. “I think it was something she never got over,” he said. “You have a scar – a mental, psychological scar – but it was Terry [Waite] that said to me a scar is perhaps the start of the healing process. What happens over time is the scar doesn’t go, you always know it’s there, and the memories are always there. For mum that scar was there but it got less pronounced.”
Phil, a former maths teacher, went on to receive an OBE for his work helping hostages and their families through the charity Hostage International.
The family have always been keen to express their gratitude to the people of Liverpool for the love and support shown to them over the years. In an interview with the ECHO in 2014, Paul said: “I think about Ken all the time. It is a pain that never goes away. But the support we have had from the people of Liverpool has always been incredible. I would like to thank them from the bottom of my heart.”
