Killed hostage's life packed with travel and helping others

LINDA Norgrove loved Afghanistan. Born thousands of miles away in Sutherland, it was to the war-torn desert state that she was drawn.

The bright young girl spent her childhood on a croft on the Isle of Lewis where she and her sister, Sofie, shared a Highland pony and went to the local primary school in Uig, which had just 30 pupils and three teachers. She would often return to visit her parents house on the island.

From a young age she suffered itchy feet. After gaining sufficient highers for university entrance at 17, she spent a gap year working for a stable in Belgium and then travelling around Spain and France.

In 1992, she began her higher education at the University of Aberdeen. She gained a first class honours degree in tropical environmental science and took the class prize.

She went on to the University of London in 1996 where she studied for a masters degree in rural resources and environmental policy, graduating with a distinction the following year.

A stint of postgraduate research at the University of Chiapas, in southern Mexico, followed before she began a PhD in development policy and management at the University of Manchester in 1998.

As part of the course she spent almost two years carrying out field research around Mount Elgon National Park in Uganda.

Fluent in Spanish, she started working for the World Wide Fund for Nature in Peru, where she was responsible for managing and monitoring the WWF-Peru Forest Programme.

But it was her next job that would take her to Afghanistan, where she worked for the United Nations in Kabul from 2005 to 2008 as a project officer for the environment and rural development and quickly became fluent in Dari.

Her managerial experience was soon recognised and she became involved in schemes to build roads and irrigation canals, to retrain ex-soldiers and to find alternative livelihoods for opium poppy growers, as well as helping to formulate climate change policy.

Yet she still found time to learn, studying for an MBA through distance learning at the University of Warwick. She had yet to complete her thesis.

In 2008, Norgrove moved with the UN to Laos, but she missed Afghanistan so much that she spent three weeks of her annual leave there, trekking the Wakhan corridor in the north in the extreme north east of the country between Pakistan and Tajikistan.

She was a keen walker, and in her early 20s spent three months cycling through China and Tibet.

She returned to Afghanistan for good to join the charity Development Alternatives in 2008 and had been working in the country ever since, compelled by a desire to help in any way she could. But it was not enough to protect her from the insurgents who kidnapped and later killed her - a tragic end to a vibrant life packed with adventure, and focused on helping people in need around the world.