THE sole survivor of a rebel attack on British forces spoke of his ordeal yesterday at an inquest into the death of his three colleagues.

Royal Military Policemen Major Matthew Titchener, 32, Warrant Officer Colin Wall, 34, and Corporal Dewi Pritchard, 35, were killed in Basra, in August 2003, after gunmen opened fire on their vehicle at close range.

Father-of-three WO Wall lived with his wife, Trish, in Middleton-One Row, near Darlington, but was originally from Crawleyside, County Durham.

At the inquest into the deaths, in Oxford, Corporal Richard Lay, 40, described how he, and his colleagues travelling in the same Nissan Pathfinder vehicle, had been badly injured in the ambush - but unlike them he survived.

He said: "There was no warning at all, nothing was said. I heard gunfire but didn't know where it was coming from."

Witnesses to the attack travelling in an Army Land Rover told how a group of men in a truck had pulled up close to the car and opened fire with what appeared to be machine-guns.

Home Office pathologist Dr Ian Hill said Cpl Pritchard, from Wales, sustained multiple gunshot wounds and would have died almost instantly. Maj Titchener, from Merseyside, and commanding the 150 Provost Company operation when he died, also suffered gunshot wounds.

The inquest heard that WO Wall, who was company sergeant major of 150 Provost Company, was killed when the vehicle veered off the road across wasteland and crashed into the side of a house.

Cpl Lay said he would give anything to turn back the clock. He said: "I would not swap a single day of my experience out there for anything apart from that particular day. If I had one wish, those men would be at home with their families now.

"I should have been killed that day, but I wasn't, and I owe it to the memory of those men to carry on with my life."

The men were part of an operation to transport 200 AK47 assault rifles north to al Amarivah, near Baghdad.

Coroner Nicholas Gardiner recorded verdicts of unlawful killing for all three men, saying the incident was "a tragedy for their families as well as those with whom they were working at that time".