British hostage murder: timeline of how the kidnap of Chris McManus and Franco Lamolinara by al-Qaeda unfolded The first video of Mr McManus and Mr Lamolinara is released. The minute-long footage shows the engineers with beards, blindfolded and on their knees. Behind them stand three men in khaki fatigues and holding automatic weapons. The hostages give their names. Mr McManus asks the Government "to meet the demands of al-Qaeda." The video is accompanied by ten-day old photos of the men without their blindfolds, but no details of the abductors or their demands are given. "No one can tell you who the kidnappers are and what they really want because they have not made any contact," a subcontractor on the central bank project said. A Nigerian group, calling itself "Al Qaida in the land beyond the Sahil," announces it has captured Mr McManus. It releases a second hostage video to a Mauritanian news agency. It shows a more heavily bearded Mr McManus in a red shirt, alongside three men in dark clothing armed with Kalashnikov rifles and a machete. McManus is shown asking the British Government to answer the demands of the group to save his life. He calls on the British people to pressurise the Government into acting, so that he could return to his family, according to Shura al Mujahideen fee Junubu Afarika, a South African Islamist website. One of the kidnappers says it will be the "last message" issued to the Prime Minister about the hostage. The speaker says the British government had failed to answer their demands and it was given two weeks to "take the correct decision." Christmas 2011 David Cameron contacts Mr McManus" family to offer his support. February 2012 A Squadron Group the Special Boat Service is deployed to Nigeria. The task force is made up of two troops of forty commandos, plus support staff, who enter the country on commercial airlines. A command post is set up in the British Embassy in Lagos. Wednesday night A deadline approaches by which the men would be killed. Intelligence is received from mobile phone calls intercepted by GCHQ in Cheltenham indicating the hostages are about to be moved. David Cameron gives approval for the SBS operation. Thusday, 10am GMT The SBS troops mount a daylight raid, driving in trucks to the house where the hostages are being held on the outskirts of Bernin Kbbi. Overhead a Hawker Beechcraft twin turbo prop plane relays footage of the operation to headquarter in Lagos and Cobra, the emergency response group at the underground headquarters in Whitehall. The troops shoot dead two of the terrorists as they storm the house but the hostages are executed by their captors with shots to the head.