Bin Laden paid Ł21m for murder of BritonsTree British telephone engineers were beheaded after Osama bin Laden paid their Chechen kidnappers millions of pounds to murder them, according to a fellow hostage.
The Britons were caught up in bin Laden's desperate efforts to get hold of nuclear weapons from the former Soviet republics. Al-Qaeda outbid the men's Surrey-based employers, who were secretly negotiating with the terrorist gang that was linked to and funded by bin Laden.
Just days after Darren Hickey, 27, Peter Kennedy, 46, Rudolph Petschi, 42, and Stanley Shaw, 58, a New Zealander, were assured that they would be freed, bin Laden agreed to pay the captors more than Ł21 million. There was a bonus included if the murder squad then stepped up attempts to steal or buy nuclear material from former Soviet military technicians.
The victims' families had not been told about the part bin Laden is said to have played in their deaths. One family member, who asked not to be named, said last night: "If this is true, then it is yet another reason to kill or capture bin Laden before others suffer."
MPs will ask the Foreign Office this week to divulge what it knows about bin Laden's alleged part in the murders.
The victims' severed heads were found by Russian troops, dumped by a roadside in Chechnya in December 1998.
It is understood that bin Laden knew that the kidnappers were negotiating with the men's employer, Granger Telecom, which is based in Surrey. The company has never spoken about its dealings with the kidnappers, but the Chechens claimed that the company offered Ł7 million.
A fellow hostage, Adurakhman Adukhov, a government official from neighbouring Dagestan, was told by the kidnap leader how al-Qaeda had won the bidding war.
He asked Arbi Barayev, a notorious Chechen warlord, why the men had to die when they had been told they were to be freed. Barayev, who had the murders filmed so that he could prove that the deed had been done, said: "Now we'll get $30 million, not $10 million. We are helping the Taleban. Our brothers from the East wanted it to be done."
Barayev said his paymasters wanted to cause a rift between Islam and the West. Barayev later described them as his "Arab friends".
Barayev was killed in a Russian military operation last June. He had openly boasted of his links with bin Laden and the Taleban, and sent a group of his fighters to an al-Qaeda training camp.
Mr Adukhov has now told a Russian magazine and BBC2's Money Programme what the kidnappers told him of their links to al-Qaeda. He described how, once bin Laden paid his blood money, the three Britons and the New Zealander were suddenly starved of food. He said: "The kidnappers took the view why bother wasting food on them when they are about to die."
Mr Adukhov said the British hostages had no idea what was happening. Their killer, who is still on the run, is another bin Laden aide known only as Khamzat. The Russians say they are still trying to find him and the powerful Chechen field commander, Khattab, who had been sent 500 of bin Laden's best Arab fighters to shore up his faltering attacks in the region.
This same group is alleged to have plotted to assassinate President Putin during his visit to Baku in Azerbaijan last January.
Angela Browning, Conservative MP for Mr Petschi's constituency of Tiverton and Honiton, has long been campaigning for more information about how and why the men died. Yesterday she said: "Something happened that weekend. The negotiations were going very well on the Thursday and Friday, but by Monday the men were dead, so something changed."
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