GCHQ announces three men closest to completing Christmas puzzle

30,000 people reached final stage of challenge designed by GCHQ cryptographers which included phonetics, semaphore and The Lord of the Rings

Thirty thousand people made it through to the final stage of GCHQ's Christmas card challenge, 550 submitted answers and six were considered complete. But in the end, only three people proved to be almost a match for Britain's finest cryptographers.

While no one got all the possible answers correct, three men came the closest to fully solving the series of challenges set by GCHQ director Robert Hannigan in his Christmas card.