UK hostage Peter Moore returns home
The Foreign Office has confirmed that British hostage Peter Moore is now safely back in the UK
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By Darren Estwick. |  |
Friday, 01, Jan 2010 05:20
By Elizabeth Davies
Peter Moore, the British hostage freed on Wednesday after being held captive for thirty-one months, has arrived at RAF Brize Norton, reports say.
It is believed Mr Moore arrived at the RAF base in Oxfordshire some time on New Year's Day.
Mr Moore has spent his time since his release in a low-key fashion at the British Embassy in Baghdad, undergoing medical examinations and talking to embassy officials and his family.
A spokesman for the Foreign Office (FCO) had said earlier "it's likely he'll be back today", which has now been confirmed.
Mr Moore is now expected to be placed in a FCO safe house and given access to "gold-star" treatment from doctors and psychiatrists. He is then due to release a statement through the Foreign Office.
Despite the thorough medical examinations, there is so far no evidence that Mr Moore was tortured during his long stay in captivity. The BBC's security correspondent, Frank Gardner, has reported that he was in fact treated extremely well during his final months as a hostage, with access to a laptop and Playstation.
Mr Moore himself may have been publicly silent, but the debate over the location of his captivity and the nationality of his captors has been gathering steam. Yesterday the Guardian claimed that their investigations proved that Mr Moore had been held in Iran, rather than Iraq, by a group with links to Iran's Revolutionary Guards.
Today General David Petraeus, the head of US Central Command, said that according to intelligence assessments Mr Moore "certainly spent part of the time, at the very least, in Iran".
This statement is at odds with the public remarks of the FCO, which has so far insisted that it has no evidence to substantiate the claims made in the Guardian. An Iranian foreign ministry spokesman yesterday dismissed the allegations as "baseless", and attributed them to British support for the Iranian opposition movement.
Asaib al-Haq (League of Righteousness), the group which took responsibility for the kidnapping, has also refuted the paper's report. Sheikh Jassim al-Saidi, one of the group's senior members, said: "[Mr Moore] was not held in Iran, and you can ask the hostage. He hadn't been in Iran a single day."
Peter Moore was working for the management and technology consultancy BearingPoint in Iraq when he was taken hostage along with his four bodyguards. The deaths of three, Jason Swindlehurst, Jason Creswell and Alec MacLachlan, have been confirmed and their bodies returned to the UK. The fourth bodyguard, Alan McMenemy, is also feared dead.