The video showed Kenneth Bigley, 62, from Liverpool, kneeling blindfolded, his hands tied behind his back and his head bowed, alongside the American colleagues with whom he was seized on Thursday from a house they shared in Baghdad.
A masked man in black standing behind the trio read a statement saying they had been taken by the Tawhid and Jihad group, which is led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Iraq’s most ruthless terrorist.
Al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian who has been linked to the Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden, has been blamed by America for more than 700 deaths in Iraq, many of them in suicide bombings.
He is said to have personally decapitated Nick Berg, an American hostage, in May. The group has also killed Korean and Egyptian hostages and two Bulgarians.
Its spokesman described Bigley and his companions, Jack Hensley and Eugene Armstrong, as “infidels and enemies of God in Baghdad” who provided “logistical support to the American bases, as we discovered following their interrogation and from electronic e-mails found on them”.
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Then, after an attack on Iyad Allawi, the Iraqi prime minister, for supporting “foreign infidels who have abused the honour and dignity of Muslim women”, he delivered his chilling threat.
Muslim “sisters” must be released from the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad and another jail in the southern port of Umm Qasr in the British-controlled area of Iraq, he said.
“Or else and in the name of God, the only thing these three men will get from us is to have their necks sawn and cut off so that they become an example to others.”
Each hostage was allowed to make a brief statement on camera. Bigley, his white hair unkempt, looked frightened and fatigued as he confirmed the nature of his work in Iraq.
“My job consists of installing and furnishing camps at Taji base,” he said, referring to an American base 15 miles north of Baghdad. A rifle was shown pointing at Hensley’s head.
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The video was delivered to Al-Jazeera, the Arab television news channel, on Friday night, but the deadline for the prisoners’ release is understood to be tomorrow morning.
However, Lieutenant-Colonel Barry Johnson, a spokesman for the US military, said there were no women prisoners in either of the two prisons named in the demands.
Bigley is thought to have been in Iraq since shortly after last year’s invasion, working for Gulf Supplies and Commercial Services, a construction contractor based in the United Arab Emirates.
The three were kidnapped without a shot fired in a dawn raid by up to 10 armed men on their unguarded villa, where neighbours had warned them of the risk. Bigley is said to have told one neighbour: “I’m not afraid; you only die once.”
The ranks of hostages held in Iraq swelled last night after 10 employees of an American-Turkish company were seized by a previously unknown group. The “Salafist Brigades of Abu Bakr al-Siddiq” threatened to kill them unless their company pulled out of Iraq in three days. The hostages appeared to be from the Middle East.