Details have emerged about the squalid conditions two hostages endured during their final days of life under the watchful eye of their alleged al-Qaeda-linked captors.
The bodies of Chris McManus and Franco Lamolinara were found on Thursday during a joint British-Nigerian rescue operation, which has ignited a diplomatic dispute with Italy.
At the house in Sokoto where the bodies were discovered, the water supply came from dipping a plastic bucket into a simple underground tank. Sokoto is the major city of Nigeria's dusty northwest.
Blood pooled under a toilet and a smashed sink in a tiny bathroom, the site where McManus and Lamolinara died at the hands of their captors, according to those living around the compound.
On Friday, Italy demanded an explanation for why it had learnt about the raid only after British special forces began their assault with Nigeria's military.
The rescue attempt began on Thursday morning in Sokoto's Mabera neighborhood, a sprawling maze of sandy roads and single-storey
cement homes surrounding the city of 500,000 people. Residents said a seemingly unending barrage of gunfire followed, as did an attack led by a military armoured personnel carrier.
Once inside in the compound, soldiers found the two men had been killed. Details of how and when they died remained unclear on Friday, said Steve Field, a spokesman for British Prime Minister David Cameron. But Field said "early indications were that both men were murdered by their captors before they could be rescued".
The operation grew out of co-operation between Nigeria's security forces and British military and intelligence officers who had been in the country for several months, officials familiar with the details of the operation said. In recent weeks, a contingent of special forces soldiers - drawn from Britain's elite Special Boat Service - arrived in Nigeria to assist, officials said.
That preparation apparently went on without the knowledge of Italy, whose president, Giorgio Napolitano, demanded an explanation on Friday from British officials for this "inexplicable" failure.
British Foreign Secretary William Hague defended his country's decision, saying there was no time to confer and that Italy was
informed only once the rescue mission was already under way.
Hague held talks with his Italian counterpart on Friday over the failed rescue, while Britain's ambassador to Italy also met officials in Rome.
After the meeting, Hague and Foreign Minister Giulio Terzi issued a joint statement in which they "agreed on the urgency of sharing full information to facilitate the reconstruction and understanding of these events".
The rescue effort ends months of uncertainty about what happened to McManus and Lamolinara. McManus was working for the construction company B.Stabilini when he was kidnapped on May 12 by gunmen who stormed his apartment in the city of Birnin-Kebbi, about 180 kilometres from Sokoto. Lamolinara was also abducted. A German colleague escaped by scaling a wall, but a Nigerian engineer was shot and wounded.
A video released later showed the kidnappers claiming they belonged to al-Qaeda and threatening to kill McManus and Lamolinara if their demands were not met.
Britain's Foreign Office has said the two men were held by terrorists associated with Boko Haram, a radical Islamist sect in Nigeria blamed for more than 300 killings this year alone.
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