The dying wish of the 100th British serviceman to die in action in Iraq was fulfilled today when he was reburied alongside other fallen war heroes.

Second Lieutenant Jonathan Bracho-Cooke, 24, was unable to be buried in the military section of his local cemetery because space there was reserved for troops killed in the Second World War and their widows.

But following calls for a reconsideration by his family, the Commonwealth War Graves Commission ruled Lt Bracho-Cooke's body could be exhumed and he was reburied this morning in the military section of Hove Cemetery, East Sussex.

As a lone bugler sounded, relatives of Lt Bracho-Cooke gathered round his new resting place during the half-hour service.

Speaking ahead of the reburial, his father Jonathan Cooke, who lives in Hove, said: "We are pleased that Jonathan can be buried in an area where we feel he deserves to be having died serving his country.

"We would have liked not to have gone through this. It has been traumatic but we are pleased that the powers that be have decided Jonathan can be buried in the military section."

Lt Bracho-Cooke was commanding the Warrior patrol in the As Sarraji district of Basra when a roadside bomb exploded near the US consulate on February 5 last year. A number of Iraqi civilians were wounded.

The promising young officer was due to marry his fiancee, Laura Bottomley, in August last year. His death marked a sorry landmark in the number of British troops killed in action in Iraq since the conflict began.

An estimated 500 people attended his funeral service at St George's Roman Catholic Church in Hove in front of friends, family and servicemen from his regiment, the 2nd Battalion The Duke of Lancaster's Regiment.

Mr Cooke said: "We wanted to bury Jonathan in the military section of the cemetery but were told we couldn't because there was a restriction, a legal covenant, on that area restricting it to those servicemen who died in action in the Second World War.

"They wouldn't allow it to be used for other soldiers who died which seemed odd because there is unlikely to be any more servicemen dying in the Second World War. We protested but were told that there is a legal covenant in place.

"When you have a funeral to arrange, you haven't got an awful lot of time to plan, so Jonathan was eventually buried in another part of Hove Cemetery but we just felt it wasn't right.

"We wrote to various influential people, including our MP Celia Barlow, last year and finally we got a letter from the Army saying they decided they would allow a new line of graves to be provided in the military section and that we could rebury Jonathan there."

Lt Bracho-Cooke, who graduated in the top one-third from Sandhurst as a Second Lieutenant in 2006, revealed his desire to be buried alongside fallen military personnel after visiting a war cemetery with friends in Burma.

Peter Francis, of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, said: "The land was granted specifically for Second World War personnel and their widows and there was indeed a legal covenant for that purpose.

"Over the past few months, the commission, the Ministry of Defence and Brighton and Hove City Council have been working together to identify a solution for the family."

He said Lt Bracho-Cooke's grave, with non-World War headstone, will be maintained by the commission on behalf of the MoD to the same standard as the other military graves in the plot.