Liverpool lowered flags to half-mast and held a two-minute silence yesterday for Kenneth Bigley, the British engineer beheaded in Iraq by his kidnappers.
Bigley's home town ground to a halt at the stroke of midday to remember the 62-year-old engineer whose heart-rending pleas for help so touched Britons.
"I can't put into words the sorrow we feel. If we feel this way, I can't imagine how Ken's mother must feel. I feel like I have lost somebody I know, a brother," said Rose Watts, 65, after observing the silence.
It was the northern English city's darkest day since 96 Liverpool soccer fans were killed 15 years ago in a crush at the Hillsborough stadium in nearby Sheffield.
"This city is hurting now," said Liverpool's Roman Catholic Archbishop Patrick Kelly.
"This is the worst thing that has happened to Liverpool since the Hillsborough tragedy and before that, this city went through great suffering in the war," he said.
At the normally bustling Clayton Square shopping centre, hundreds of Liverpudlians streamed out of the stores and stood with heads bowed, hands clasped in front of them.
Bigley, who was seized from his Baghdad home on September 16, was the first British hostage to be killed in Iraq. His kidnappers had demanded the release of women prisoners in Iraq.
The horror of his beheading was compounded by reports from insurgent sources in Iraq that he had escaped briefly from his captors before they killed him.
The sources said Bigley managed to get away for about half an hour with the help of one of his captors before he was caught in farmland near Latifiya, southwest of Baghdad.
"If it is true that one man may have tried to help rescue him, it offers a glimmer of hope to think that he had the humanity even for one minute," said an elderly woman, who only gave her first name, Bernadette.