Bigley's wife 'is coping'

2004-10-09 09:42

Bangkok - The Thai wife of murdered hostage Kenneth Bigley was grieving with relatives on Saturday after British officials confirmed his gruesome murder in Iraq after a three-week ordeal, family and officials said.

Sombat Bigley, 35, married for seven years, was in "great emotional distress" but had contacted her sister to tell she was coping after the horrific beheading of the engineer, they said.

Officials from the British embassy in Bangkok confirmed to Sombat that her husband had been killed during a face-to-face meeting at an undisclosed location late on Friday, thought to be near Bangkok.

"Sombat called me last night and told me not to worry about her," her sister Sunee Pansook said.

'She's fine'

"She is fine and she can handle it. She said that whatever will happen will happen although as family members it's totally unacceptable for us.

"She said all she wanted to do was to stay alone," said Sunee after her sister's repeated public appeals for the safe return of her husband came to nothing.

In one of her appeals, Sombat had described her husband as a "nice, kind-hearted man with a wonderful sense of humour".

"He transformed my struggling and lonely life into one of happiness," she said.

Bigley had contacted her almost every day while in Iraq until he was seized from his accommodation in Baghdad along with two United States colleagues, who were also beheaded.

"We have been updating her regularly over the last few weeks," a British embassy spokesperson said Saturday. "She's obviously in a state of great emotional distress but okay."

There were no immediate plans for her to fly to Iraq or Britain where the rest of Bigley's family lived, he said.

Met his wife on holiday

Bigley, 62, met his wife, who worked in a bakery shop, while on holiday from his job in Dubai. They exchanged letters for a year before Bigley returned to Thailand and proposed.

After his work was completed in Iraq, he was due to retire with his wife to the village of Sorathavorn in Thailand's north-east where a new villa had just been built for them and where they planned to grow mangos.

Bigley, 62, was beheaded with a knife after a group of hooded armed men handed down a "sentence of execution", according to reports on Friday.

He had been held since September 16 by Tawhid wal Jihad (Unity and Holy War), the group led by Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi which had demanded the release of Iraqi female prisoners from British and US custody.

- AFP