The fiance of Karen Woo, the British doctor killed in the ambush of aid workers in northern Afghanistan, had the harrowing task today of identifying her body just two weeks before they were due to wed.
The remains of Woo and the bodies of nine other aid workers, including six Americans and a German, were flown back by helicopter to Kabul where many of them will be buried in the city's only Christian graveyard.
Mark "Paddy" Smith said he wanted the chance to say goodbye to his 36-year-old fiancee, whom he had been due to marry this month at the Chelsea registry office in London.
"I just wanted to say goodbye to my baby bear," he said. "I just wanted to make sure that she hadn't been beaten or brutalised".
The former army officer, who works in Kabul, said there were no signs that she had been mistreated. Medical staff said she had been shot twice.
The group were ambushed in the relatively peaceful Badakhshan province by about 10 bearded gunmen as they were returning to Kabul from a two-week mission organised by the Christian charity International Assistance Mission (IAM) to provide medical care to impoverished villages in neighbouring Nuristan.
Local police said they were robbed, lined up and then shot one by one.
Smith said Woo, to whom he had become engaged after a "whirlwind romance", had been nervous in the run-up to her departure, but he had supported her decision to go.
"This was the trip of a lifetime," he said. "Not many people are going to get the chance to trek into Nuristan and deliver healthcare to people who have probably never had it before".
William Hague, the foreign secretary, denounced the murder of Woo and her colleagues as a "deplorable and cowardly act". The US ambassador to Kabul called the attack "gut-wrenching".
In a lengthy statement, Woo's family described her as a "true hero". Dismissing Taliban allegations that the group had been trying to convert Afghans to Christianity, they said her "motivation for going to Afghanistan was purely humanitarian".
They added: "She wanted the world to know there was more than a war going on in Afghanistan, that people were not getting their basic needs met. She wanted the ordinary people of Afghanistan, especially the women and children, to be able to receive healthcare".
Dirk Frans, the IAM executive director, said he believed that many of the international members of the team would be buried in the "British cemetery", the small walled graveyard where soldiers killed during the second Anglo-Afghan war of 1879 were first buried. The Guardian
