“I have no recollection of being involved in this sad story, although I remember vividly being shocked by the tragic death of the young man,” he said. “There was some argument about how British was he – he did have an Iranian passport and that was the decisive thing: he wasn’t a British citizen.”Bazoft, an Iranian-born freelance reporter who held British residency, had been invited by Saddam’s government to visit Iraq with other journalists on a group trip to report on elections planned for the country’s Kurdish areas. It was his sixth visit to the country and he was keen to get a story that the Observer could use.