WITH regard to the latest hostage crisis in Yemen, I think we were all relieved, like most people, that there was a happy outcome to this and not the bloodbath seen out there recently.

This highlights the need for a calm, measured approach when dealing with people who are prepared to take others hostage for their own ends.

To do this is a despicable act that solves nothing and only causes heartache and misery for others who are not able to influence events themselves. If you look at our case, all that has been achieved is a great sadness by five families in the West that sons and husbands have not been allowed to return home.

This is made all the more sad for us as the remains of our son, Paul, have not been found and, what is worse, that there are people out there who have the answers, I am sure, but who are, for whatever reason, not prepared to tell us.

On another topic, I was saddened to hear that the last remaining police officer involved in the Steven Lawrence inquiry has put himself beyond the reach of justice by retiring, which, according to his contract, he is perfectly at liberty to do.

But this will not help the family left behind who are still trying to come to terms with the fact that a group of mindless louts have been able to take the life of their son and get away with it, and the police officers concerned, who have not done their job, are also to escape accountability.

One of the many emotions that are felt after losing a younger member of the family, particularly in such a brutal way as we lost Paul, and the Lawrence family lost their son, Steven, is a colossal sense of the waste of a life.

Then to be told by the authorities and commentators that now is the time to move on is no help and it is a very callous suggestion to make without a resolution, for a resolution to the case would be one way of absolving that waste.

And, yes, we would all love to move on.

In our case, officials we have dealt with over the last three and a half years have moved on, been transferred to other areas, retired, or simply taken a career move of one sort or another, but we can't - and neither, I feel, can the Lawrence family.

BOB WELLS, Bracken Close, Feniscowles, Blackburn.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.