TELEVISION pictures of captured coalition forces personnel broadcast this week brought back disturbing memories for John Peters - now based in Wyre Forest - who was an RAF airman going through a similar ordeal 12 years ago.

The former pilot sprang to global prominence during the first Gulf War, after being captured by Saddam Hussein's forces, along with John Nicol, when they were shot down during the action.

What followed was a series of beatings and sensory deprivation as they were savagely tortured and interrogated for days on end.

"I was hit with baseball bats, rubber truncheons and had my hair set on fire, beaten with cudgels and generally beaten up," said Mr Peters, of Mamble.

"For the first five days, I had a bag on my head; I didn't see anything for the first five days, so it's not the place you want to be.

"They had a gun, just off screen, against my head and I thought that they were going to shoot me."

He hoped the American servicemen and women paraded on Iraqi television this week in images later broadcast all over the world were not suffering what he had gone through a dozen years earlier.

"You've got to be very careful not to make assumptions about what's going to happen to them this time round and what sort of treatment they're getting," he explained.

He has also found himself with mixed feelings watching the television images, saying: "To a degree, I'm ambivalent, really, because it's not me.

"I have an understanding of how they feel, perhaps because I have been a prisoner of war, but it's different when you're not involved in the war.

"I think, like anybody, you revisit the thoughts that you had back in the war but I never saw any pictures come out because I was at the other side of the pictures, so my thoughts are quite different.

"My thoughts on pictures like that are sort of borrowed from the reactions I got when I returned. It's completely different in my case from how other people saw the pictures."

He was in Iraqi hands for seven weeks before his eventual release and return to the UK.

Mr Peters now runs a business, with partners including former England rugby union international Rory Underwood, in which they teach self-belief, leadership and communication skills.