LONDON, Sept 25 (AFP) - The extremists who are holding British civilian engineer Kenneth Bigley hostage in Iraq are "manipulating" the media in pursuit of their goal of destabilising Iraq, Prime Minister Tony Blair said in an interview to appear in a Sunday newspaper.
"What these terrorists understand is that they can use and manipulate the modern media to gain enormous publicity for themselves and put democratic politics and politicians in a very difficult position," Blair told The Observer, according to excerpts released Saturday.
"The reason why these foreign terrorists are there in Iraq is to try to stop the country getting better, to murder anybody who tries to help its reconstruction or its democratic process," he said.
"And our response, surely, has got to be to stand firm against that."
Bigley was snatched on September 16 -- along with two US colleagues -- by Tawhid wal Jihad (Unity and Holy War), which demanded the release of women held in US-run prisons in Iraq.
On Saturday two British Muslim envoys arrived in Baghdad to see if they can speed up his release, in the wake of emotional appeals from Bigley's family in his hometown Liverpool and from his Thai wife in Bangkok.
Bigley himself was last seen on Wednesday in a fuzzy video posted on the Internet, in which he appealed directly to Blair -- US President George W. Bush's stuanchest ally on Iraq -- to save his life.
Speaking to the Observer at his country residence Chequers before going to the Labour Party conference in Brighton, southern England, Blair said he felt "immensely sorry" for both Bigley and his kin.
"I think most people are praying for him (and) his family, I think, have been extraordinarily stoical and very dignified throughout it," the prime minister said.