'Who killed my friend Terry Lloyd?'

The war is all but over. But at ITV News, bosses are still trying to find out what happened to their reporter and his two missing colleagues. Ian Burrell reports

Imagine, if you possibly can, trying to celebrate the greatest triumph of your career when that very same event claimed the life of your best friend. David Mannion, the editor of ITV News, finds himself in such a position. Glowing with pride at the achievements of his staff in covering "the greatest story since the Second World War", he is simultaneously grieving for Terry Lloyd, his star reporter and friend of 30 years.

And, while Mannion boasts of a succession of scoops from the Iraqi conflict and incisive analysis of the campaign, there is one story he admits he still hasn't got to the bottom of: that of Lloyd's death. A month after the veteran reporter was killed on the road to Basra, there is a disturbing number of unanswered questions about what actually happened.

Lloyd, as far as Mannion can ascertain, was in a car with three colleagues, driving past coalition positions, on the morning of Saturday 22 March. Suddenly, they were approached by a small convoy of Iraqi soldiers and went into retreat. But the Iraqis, in a saloon car and a pick-up truck, drew up alongside them, possibly wishing to surrender. Coalition forces opened fire. Daniel Demoustier, a cameraman working with Lloyd, managed to escape into a ditch and eventually got back to Allied lines. But his account, understandably, was incomplete, the sketchy recollection of someone who had come under fire and did not know why. Lloyd's body was later tracked down to a hospital in Basra. But exactly why and by whom he was shot has yet to be established. Most important of all, nothing is yet known of what happened to the remaining two members of the crew, Fred Nerac, 43, a cameraman, and Hussein Osman, a translator. For the past four weeks, ITV News colleagues have been working ceaselessly to find answers.

Mannion, who first worked with Lloyd when they were reporters at a Derby news agency in the Seventies, has assigned his deputy to work full-time on the inquiry. ITV staff are working with a private security firm, AKE, made up of former military personnel, to scour hospitals and mortuaries in the Basra area for the bodies of the two men. Posters of Nerac and Osman are on display around the city.

The team has also tracked down and interviewed British and American soldiers who were close to the scene of the shooting, in which the Iraqis returned fire, and the pick-up truck, the saloon and the ITV car were all destroyed by coalition forces. The searches have even been extended to Baghdad after reports from local people in Basra that the Iraqi forces may have taken some foreign nationals to the capital.

"We are piecing together snippets of information. Some of it, frankly, contradictory," says Mannion. "It's a bit like a jigsaw puzzle, and we certainly haven't got all the pieces in place. But we are finding more pieces day by day and we don't intend to rest until we have brought the issue of what happened to Fred and Hussein to a conclusion."

He says ITV has "no categorical proof as to whether they are alive or whether they are not".

The inquiry has not been helped by conditions in Iraq. "This is all against the backdrop of quite a large degree of chaos," says Mannion. But Stewart Purvis, chief executive of ITN, believes there are other more significant factors hampering the search for the truth. The American military authorities and the British Ministry of Defence, he says, have consistently refused to shed any light on the matter. Clearly angry, he says: "ITV has not received any information of any kind, at any stage, from any of the military."

The statement that Purvis released the day after the Lloyd tragedy was compiled without help from the military; officials refused an offer to verify the facts. "The Americans have never even said to us officially that they opened fire. That's our belief and supposition," he says. Even a personal promise to investigate made by Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, to Fred Nerac's wife, Fabienne, has yielded nothing. "Since then, we've not received any information of any kind," says Purvis.

The British military, which had units deployed nearby, is also guilty of withholding facts, he says. "I want them to reveal the information that they undoubtedly have, but for some reason will not release, about what British troops know about what happened."

The ITN chief says he understands the initial reluctance of the military to provide potentially sensitive information during an ongoing conflict. His team has been "incredibly patient" and he is mystified and "disappointed" by the continued lack of co-operation. "When we asked for information before we were often told, 'You've got to be realistic, these people are still fighting'," he says. "It was probably sensitive whilst the war was on but the war has been off, arguably, for about a week now."

But, through its own inquiries from American and British soldiers, Iraqi civilians and embedded journalists from other media, the ITV team has gathered considerable material on what happened on 22 March. "The persistence of people working on this is quite spectacular, as you can imagine," says Purvis. "There is a meeting in this office every morning."

On an almost daily basis, new facts are coming to light. And Purvis intends to publish the information that has been uncovered, "to actually have the specific name and number of the platoon involved in the firing. Dogged determination by one woman ITN producer based in Iraq has now led us to that unit." Some of the eye-witnesses have been filmed on tape. "We have the option of making a programme but that's really not driving us," he says.

The death of Terry Lloyd cast a shadow over the ITV team but has also acted as an inspiration to colleagues. Mannion says: "The last thing Terry would have wanted was for us all to collapse and say, 'Let's stop doing our job as journalists.'" ITV News "redoubled its efforts" to produce the "best possible" coverage of the war, he says.

Staff were already stung by industry criticisms of the "dumbing-down" of ITV news and current affairs and comments by BBC chiefs that they no longer represented "serious competition". Mannion arrived six months ago and found "a team that were enormously talented but needed reminding just how talented they were and needed an opportunity to prove that to themselves and their audience".

The rescheduling of "News At When?" to a regular 9pm slot contributed to excellent ratings, with four programmes pulling audiences of between 8.8 million and 9.8 million. BBC1's 10 o'clock news achieved a highest figure of eight million. The good figures for ITV News were built on a succession of great exclusives. Philip Reay-Smith was first into Iraq with British forces; Juliette Bremner was first into Basra; Julian Manyon was first into Tikrit; and John Irvine greeted the arrival of US troops with the words "Welcome to Baghdad" as they first arrived in the outskirts of the Iraqi capital.

Framed on the wall above the news editor's desk is the cameraman Phil Bye's memorable shot of the falling statue of Saddam Hussein. Yet Mannion has to concede that his "defining moment" of the campaign is captured in the picture hanging next to it: a portrait of his mate Terry, taken at ITN just before he went off to war.