They locked his cat in the attic for two days without food or water - you can still see the scratch marks on the door. "They thought I might be using the cat to spread plague," Kurtz explains.

They also confiscated his wife's body. Hope's ashes now sit on the mantelpiece in Kurtz's study. "They still have bits of her," Kurtz says.

Here it is, the "War on Terror" at work.