[2] On the following morning, he returned to the scene alone and without military authority[3] where he was surrounded in his army Land Rover by a crowd of Egyptians, one of whom took his pistol and looting personal belongings like his watch and chain.
On 22 December 1956 the kidnappers allowed Major Wiks, a Norwegian UN officer, to see a man in a British uniform claiming he was Moorhouse.
A family friend and former army colleague of the Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, the British Member of Parliament Colonel Cyril Banks, travelled to Cairo in an effort to establish the missing officer's fate.
On Christmas Eve, 24 December 1956 he finally had a meeting with President Nasser who told him that Moorhouse had died of suffocation when held captive.
[9] According to an account made in 2006 by one of the Egyptian kidnappers, Moorhouse was captured and then taken to a safe house where he was trussed, gagged, tortured and hidden under the floor.
When residents of Port Said planned to turn the house where Moorhouse had been held into a museum,[20] British public opinion was further inflamed.
It was also the inspiration for the depiction of Leslie Williams, a British conscript soldier seized by the IRA in Brendan Behan's play The Hostage.