LONDON, 29 March 2003 — British Prime Minister Tony Blair stuck yesterday by his charge that a British soldier was executed near Basra in southern Iraq, despite being branded a liar by the soldier’s family. Although admitting there was not conclusive proof of how he and another soldier died, Blair’s official spokesman said the prime minister had been right to say they had been executed.

“It is terrible to talk in these terms but since we don’t have the two bodies we cannot be absolutely sure,” Blair’s spokesman said. “But every piece of information we have points in the direction of these men having been executed in a very brutal fashion,” he said.

Such claims are “lies,” the sister of Sapper Luke Allsopp told the Daily Mirror yesterday. Nina Allsopp said officers from his barracks told her he had died on the spot in battle. Qatar-based Al-Jazeera television’s images of the bloodstained bodies of the two men, who disappeared Sunday after being caught in crossfire were splashed across front pages in Britain on Thursday, provoking widespread outrage.

A clearly angry Blair said at a news conference in Camp David outside Washington that the two men shown on Al-Jazeera had been “executed”. “If anyone needed any further evidence of the depravity of Saddam’s regime, this atrocity provides it. It is yet one more flagrant breach of all the proper conventions of war,” Blair told reporters.

But Allsopp’s sister angrily refuted Blair’s accusations. “It makes a big difference to us knowing that he died quickly,” she told the Mirror. “We can’t understand why people are lying about what happened. It must be a mistake. It’s important to us that people know the truth, that people know what really happened.”

The Daily Mirror also said that the colonel of the regiment to which Allsopp belonged had assured his family he had been killed when his Land Rover was ambushed on Sunday. “The colonel from his barracks came around to our house to tell us he was not executed. Luke’s Land Rover was ambushed and he died instantly,” his sister Nina told the anti-war tabloid. “The colonel told us he was doing what he could to set the record straight. We are very angry,” she said.

Blair’s version of events was also challenged by the Iraqi Information Minister Muhammad Saeed Al-Sahhaf who told Abu Dhabi television that the prime minister had “lied to the public”. “They are either killed in the battlefield, and most of them are killed because they are cowards and the rest are captured,” he said.

Meanwhile, Israel’s Foreign Ministry has told Britain’s ambassador, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw’s remarks that the West was guilty of hypocrisy by taking action against Iraq and not against Israel for not implementing UN resolutions were “revolting.” Yoav Biran, director general of the Foreign Ministry, summoned Ambassador Sherard Cowper-Coles late Thursday to tell him that Straw’s remarks were “totally unfounded,” a ministry spokesman said yesterday.

“The comments ... are particularly revolting and threaten to damage the Middle East peace process,” especially within the context of Britain’s action along with the United States against Iraq, he said. “Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom took Mr. Straw’s remarks very seriously and in particular the totally unfounded attempt to establish a parallel between the international campaign against Iraq ... and the Arab-Israeli conflict,” he told the ambassador, the spokesman added.