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Footage of Ken Bigley's murder is widely available on the internet, along with that of other hostages killed in Iraq. Who is watching the videos and why?
It was a short video released to Arab TV and posted on a radical website which confirmed the worst for Ken Bigley's family on Friday - he had become the latest hostage to be killed in Iraq.

But as the 62-year-old Briton's brother Paul told journalists that he would never watch the footage of the murder himself, it quickly became freely available on the internet to anyone who cared to look.

It is not only the harrowing scenes of Mr Bigley's final moments that have been posted on the web. Scores of sites also offer footage of the deaths of other hostages, including Eugene Armstrong and Jack Hensley, the Americans kidnapped with Mr Bigley and murdered first.

Asked to watch the five minute video showing Mr Bigley's death as part of his work, Reuters cameraman Maher Nazih said "it was awful". So why would others freely chose to see the images?

Curiosity

One viewer, who asked not to be named, says he watches the footage mostly out of curiosity.

"You almost can't believe that a group of people could be so pitiless as to carry out something so cruel and bestial, and you need to have it confirmed," he says.

"Watching them evokes a mixture of emotions - mainly distress at the obvious fear and suffering of the victim, but also revulsion at the gore, and anger against the perpetrators."

For many such casual viewers, the footage is found on sites which appear to host the images as a form of macabre entertainment.

Some carry the videos alongside that of other, entirely unrelated murder victims and "bizarre" deaths.

Warnings

Other sites claim a higher purpose in showing the videos, arguing that to understand the world you need to know what is going on.

One organisation in the US, for example, says it shows the videos because it is dedicated to the fight against terrorism.

Introducing the footage of Mr Bigley's death it warns that it is "violent and horrific", that it is not suitable for children and will be disturbing for many adults.

But it continues: "In accordance with our policy that the American people need to know the tactics of our enemy, we are making the video available."

'Vile and vicious'

Douglas Hagmann, the director of the organisation, says it decided to go ahead because the media was sanitising the issue.

"All too frequently, we hear the mainstream news talk about a hostage being 'beheaded' by 'militants', 'insurgents' or other innocuous sounding descriptive terms," he says.

"It is my belief that the majority of the people in the US and the UK do not know how vile and vicious these people are, and how horrific these acts are, especially when they are described in such mild terms.

"These are acts of pure evil and savagery that must not be minimised by such references in the press."

'Vicious nature'

Whatever the purpose of the sites, demand to see the images appears to be high.

Mr Hagmann reports that the videos have been downloaded from his site on more than one million occasions, with most of the visitors apparently coming from the US, Canada and the UK.

He also says he has received more than 3,000 e-mails from people who have seen them.

"About 95% of these e-mails have been positive in nature, in response to us showing the vicious nature of the enemy we face," he reports.

But why do people watch them when they know it will be gruesome?

Dr Guy Cumberbatch, a chartered psychologist and expert in media violence, says the desire to watch the videos is similar to that which makes people watch horror videos.

"A lot of it's to do with the taboo of seeing stuff we're not supposed to," he says.

People are motivated by curiosity about the human body, just as they are when they drive past the scene of a car crash. The response is a normal one and not reprehensible, he suggests.

"The police have always been wrong to talk of the ghouls that go to watch, but it's more of a feeling of 'there, but for the grace of God, go I."

A desire to see such things is a "fairly healthy, normal function" of many people, he says, and there's little evidence to suggest that seeing gruesome images desensitises people to death or suffering.

'Moral judgement'

Despite Mr Hagmann's arguments for making the footage available, many people believe it is in poor taste.

The UK-based Internet Watch Foundation, which monitors internet content, says it believes it could be illegal under the Obscene Publications Act if it was hosted by sites based in Britain.

A spokeswoman says: "We're aware of them, but we suspect 99% of them are hosted in the US. We would say it's pretty unlikely any ISP [internet service provider] in the UK would host that content."

Preventing sites outside the UK from carrying the videos is unlikely to happen, the IWF says. International agreement may exist on how to tackle sites showing child abuse images, but this is a very different case.

Whether or not to carry the images, or indeed look at them, remains "a moral judgement".




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I confess that I have watched a couple beheading videos. I had a couple reasons for doing so. First, the news footage we get from Iraq is so sanitized and bloodless, one might assume that nobody is actually getting hurt over there. Sure, they say on the news that twelve were killed here, five were killed there, but as they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. I feel a responsibility as an American citizen to make an effort see the results of my country's foreign policy. I feel a need to get all the information I can so that as an informed citizen I can make responsible choices at the voting booth. The other reason why I watched the videos I did was that I was morbidly curious. I'm not proud of it, but I was. I'm a big fan of horror movies, so I figured I could take it. In truth, it was much worse than any horror movie if for no other reason than I knew it was real, a real human was being murdered.
Edward Hammerbeck, Louisville, Kentucky, US

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