Margaret Hassan

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I have just heard that Al'Jazera have shown a vidio of this poor woman begging for her life saying that she doesn't want to die like Ken Bigley.

Why do these videos get shown? How does it benefit? Not the victim, Ken Bigly showed that. The terrorists wasn to terrify and that is just what these tapes do. This is why they want them made, why they force these poor people to do this.

This isn't 'news'. How could her saying she didn't want to be beheaded be 'news'? I realise that curtailing the freedom of the press can be a dangerous thing to start, but shouldn't we be asking some questions about why we are being shown these things and if they help anyone except the guilty?

Unbelievable, if correct. No doubt the murderers will be at prayers on Friday .

Hideous news. So so so so so sad.

So sad

I hadn't heard this - how terrible

This is terrible news. I'm still reeling about our boys from the Black Watch - so young too

I must confess I really did think she might be released - even Al Zarqawi allegedly said he thought she should be freed.I was crying when they reported it on news 24.What is the point of killing her? apparently she was shot, which I suppose is at least slightly better than being beheaded.Not much consolation to her family though.Her poor husband.

Oh for fucks sake, that poor woman had been living there for years, working to try to make it a better place to live... this is just so sad.

It is truly tragic when someone like this is murderer. An act of utter evilness considering all the work she had done with the Iraqi people.

Unlike the other hostage murder Margaret Hassan was purely there for humanitarian reasons, leading a life we should see as inspirational. Helping others and doing good deeds. Her poor family must be heartbroken it has ended like this.

I meant to say "when someone like this is murdered" of course.

This is bad isn't it? Very bad. Feel incredibly sad now.

What makes me despair is that the world has become so dangerous that AID workers have become targets. I personally believe that this is because the western world isn't generally interested unless the victim is 'one of their own'
Can't help but feel that Blair and Bush have made this world a much more dangerous place (and please don't think I mean the terrorist have no responsibility here, they do).

Very, very sad.

Like somebody else here I thought they would surely let her go when they knew who she was and what she'd done for the country.

A friend of hers wrote "Childless herself, to see her cradle infants stricken with Iraq's myriad of illnesses which have reached epidemic proportions since 1991 - linked to the destruction of water facilities and the chemically toxic and radioactive depleted uranium weapons used - one felt her passion to protect all Iraq's children as her own."

From BBC news . Look at the picture at the top and then the one at the bottom. How could they do this?

This is a terrible piece of news. Her husband was so dignified asking for the return of her body last night on the news. I am really struggling to understand my fellow man today.

makes me feel v bleak, this news

this makes me so angry, sorry im going to swear- what the fuck do they gain by killing someone who has done so much for the people of iraq? where is the sense in that. her poor husband must feel totally repugnant to his fellow countrymen.

iraq was a huge mistake, the troops will be there for years and people will continue to be kidnapped and killed in this despicable way.

the more i see of this on the tv, the more angry it makes me- what is the fucking point?
sorry again for my language. im seething

I don't want to raise a flag for the terrorists, tiredemma, but I think the point from their point of view, is to ensure that most foreigners will not touch Iraq with a bargepole, even for humanitarian reasons. They want all foreigners to go home, including aid workers, and Margaret Hassan, poor woman, was a director of an organisation which is working with the occupying forces to enable elections to happen in January. That's why she in particular was a target, because in any other circumstances a Muslim woman who had been working in Iraq for so many years could not possibly have been a legitimate target even for the looniest of terrorist groups.

The scary thing is that they may well succeed. If I was an aid worker, I certainly wouldn't want to go to Iraq, and if you were a director responsible for staff, surely it would be a horrific moral dilemma about whether to send anyone in, even if they wanted to go? Unless it's groups like the Red Crescent who are Muslim, I can't see how foreign aid can function in Iraq now.

dp has explained this war to me a million times - but i still dont get it i'm afraid. Why doesnt everyone just pull out? dp says that if they do iraq will return to a dictatorship - but from what i saw after we got saddam hussein out they didnt seem exactly grateful?! Also i thought that killing women goes against all their beliefs and that they started killing male hostages because we/usa were holding women prisoners - this says to me that this has gone way beyond religion or anything and that these terroists are going to stop at nothing.

tiredemma- do you think zealots think 'oh this is a good person we'll let them go'?

These people are not rational thinkers - they're blinkered - they are on a mission and we aint EVER going to stop them (imo)

This is terrible news; like everyone else on here I was hoping that her status as a humanitarian aid worker would save her from this fate.
However, I have wondered if the kidnappers felt they had no choice - her body has not been found yet, but if they were hiding in Fallujah, they may have been pushed over the edge by the fact that the US forces were taking the city, and felt it was necessary to 'get rid of her' so they could get away in time.
NOT making excuses for them at all, what they have done is appalling. We live in very worrying times .