No parent expects to outlive their children. But for the families of six Royal Military Policemen killed by a mob in Iraq, this was their fate. In the second of two articles, Nick Morrison talks to John Hyde about the day he buried his son.

JOHN Hyde is not a religious man, but the night his son was sent to the Gulf he went into the chapel in the hospital where he worked as a porter and prayed to God to bring Ben home safe. It was a ritual he was to repeat every night for the next five months, until the day he found out his son was dead.

He was just leaving work to go to the gym. Unknown to John, an Army chaplain and welfare officer were already with his wife Sandra. They managed to get through to the porter's lodge at the Friarage Hospital in Northallerton just as John was leaving. It was almost half past four on Tuesday, June 24, 2003.

"The padre said I should come home straight away," John recalls. "I knew there was only one reason. I just remember thinking 'Oh no, not Ben. Please God, not Ben'."

It took him three minutes to get home. He knows it was half past four, because it came on the news on the radio on the drive home that six British soldiers had been killed in Iraq.

"I went in and Sandra said, 'John, it's Ben'. I said, 'I know'. I had my car keys in my hand and I just threw them. I just wanted to smash something."

It was only later that John realised that no-one actually told him that his son had been killed. No-one had said the words that Ben was dead. "From what Sandra said they didn't actually say to her that he had been killed either. It was just an obvious assumption, I suppose," John says.

Ben was 23 when he was killed, in the town of al-Majar al-Kabar, about 90 miles north of Basra. He was one of six Royal Military Policemen who had been helping to train Iraqi police. But that day the mood in the town had turned murderous. The RMPs were attacked by a mob around 400 strong and trapped in the police station, where they were killed.

John called Ben's girlfriend Sarah, who was on her own at her mother's house in Leeds. He then called her mother, who was in the supermarket, to ask her to go home and be with Sarah. John and Sandra then went to see John's parents in Hartlepool.

Ben's funeral was held three weeks later. It brought Northallerton to a standstill.

"Every shop closed in the town except one," says John, 57. "We just weren't prepared for it. We left our house and there were a couple of people standing on the corners, and as we went past a school all the kids, these were six and seven-year-olds, were outside and they were lined up and some of them were saluting.

"We wanted to go past the Durham Ox because that was where Ben used to drink, and when we got to the High Street it was unbelievable. There were people four or five deep. My dad burst into tears."

The reaction to Ben's death astonished him, but it has also been a source of immense pride.

"From the day he was killed, people started putting flowers on the Market Cross. There are a fair few vandals in the town but nobody touched those flowers. They just grew and grew and after a week they covered the whole of the cross.

"I have had people I have never spoken to in my life come up and say they are proud they knew Ben. We still get things through the post, saying how proud we should be of people who gave their lives in the cause of freedom. It just makes you feel so proud."

What has made it harder for John and Sandra, 59, is that Ben was their only child. John believes this makes their experience different from that of the other families. Not necessarily worse, but different. It's a belief which has put him at odds with Johnny Miller, whose son Simon was also killed.

"I tried to explain to Johnny one day and he got a bit wound up, saying it is not like I have two bags of sweets and now I just have one. But it is. It is just like that, because Johnny and all the other families still have somebody to call son, somebody to send them a card on Father's Day, somebody to leave everything to, somebody to hug," he says.

"When you lose your only child you lose all of that. Twenty three years of wondering what to buy him for Christmas and for his birthday. We don't have that any more. It's probably why I feel the way I do and want to spend my time the way I do. I spent 23 years looking after Ben, I can't stop now. I don't want to stop now."

After Ben's death, John has sought to uncover every detail of what happened to his son in the Gulf, from arriving in Kuwait to moving into Iraq to his death that day in al-Majar al-Kabar. Talking to former comrades, reading reports, going over Ben's letters - it has all helped him build up a picture of his son's last few months. He is writing a book about his son's life, and is determined to preserve his son's memory.

"It helps me to know what Ben was thinking. I talk to people about what Ben was doing. I tape it and then listen to the tapes and go over and over them," he says.

"If you are reading a book and you get into it, you are actually there, you have a picture in your mind of exactly where everything is. That is what I have got."

Ben wrote 16 letters home in the 18 weeks between his deployment to Kuwait and his death. The quality of the food was a common complaint, particularly when the RMPs were having to eat Army rations while the Paras had their own cookhouse just 100 yards away. But on the whole the letters were upbeat.

"He used to write letters on the top of this concrete sports stadium and said the view of the sky from up there was like nothing you had ever seen before, the stars were fantastic," John says. "Sandra is terrified of these little gecko lizards and Ben wrote one day saying it was no good his mother going there, because he saw this lizard as big as my brother's Labrador.

"One of his letters was a list of 24 things he wanted to do when he got home. It was things like 'I want a soak in the bath', 'I don't want to smell any more', 'I want to put gel in my hair', 'I want to spend an hour watching television', 'I want to walk down the street'. Every fourth thing was more sex."

After the first two weeks in Kuwait, and for all but three weeks when they first went into Iraq, they were given 20 minutes worth of calls home a week. Most of those 20 minutes were spent calling his girlfriend Sarah. "Me and his mum usually got the last minute and a half of his card," says John.

"We spoke to him the day before he was lost, on the Monday morning. He phoned Sarah on her mobile and when he realised she was at our house he rang the home phone. I didn't know who was ringing so I picked up the phone and he said, 'I'm talking to Sarah, dad. I'll talk to you later'. I was getting ready for work, I didn't have time to chat, so he chatted to his mum and Sarah."

John wanted to find out as much as he could about how Ben died. Initial reports suggested the RMPs may have been executed with a bullet to the head, but the forensic evidence shows Ben was in one corner of a room in the police station when he was shot. He may have been covering the door. The likelihood is he was killed by bullets sprayed randomly into the room, which then ricocheted off the walls. He was not executed.

"I'm the only one apart from the coroner and the two lads who dressed Ben who know exactly where he was shot and how many times. Sandra doesn't want to know, but one of the things I was able to tell her, which to my mind makes things a little bit easier, is that Ben was not shot in the head.

"They were murdered in that they were finished off when they were helpless, but it was mainly from random shooting, rather than somebody going up to them and pulling the trigger. It makes you feel easier knowing that didn't happen," he says.