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Sun 11 Apr, 2004 04:45 pm
US hostage faces execution
Justin McCurry in Tokyo and Martin Bright
Sunday April 11, 2004
The Observer
Iraqi kidnappers last night paraded an American before television cameras, threatening to kill him unless US forces lifted the siege of Falluja. Thomas Hamill had earlier been taken prisoner and driven off in a car by masked insurgents, adding a new twist to the growing crisis over foreign hostages in Iraq.
In a tape shown on Qatar- based al-Jazeera last night, the kidnappers revealed Hamill in front of an Iraqi flag. 'Our one request is to break the siege of the City of Mosques [Falluja] during the 12 hours from six o'clock on Saturday evening,' a voice said. 'If not, he will be dealt with worse than those who were killed and burnt in Falluja.'
Earlier, Hamill, who spoke with a southern American accent and had a bandage on his arm and blood on his jeans, was shown sitting in the back seat of a car with a masked gunman next to him waving an automatic rifle, on the main highway on Baghdad's western edge where fighting took place last Friday.
The footage, taken by a cameraman from Australia's ABC television and broadcast yesterday, was filmed on Friday. The prisoner, speaking through the car's open window, identified himself as Thomas Hamill and said he was part of a convoy that was attacked.
When asked by an ABC reporter what had happened, the man said: 'They attacked our convoy. That's all I'm going to say.' Al-Jazeera said it received the tape from the kidnappers, who gave their name as 'the Mujahideen Group Kidnappings.' The television station said Hamill had said he was the only survivor of an ambush on his convoy,
The spiralling threat of kidnapping against foreigners in Iraq became more apparent when a group calling itself the 'Marytr Ahmed Yassin Brigades' in Ramadi, west of Baghdad, claimed to have 30 hostages from a variety of countries.
In a film shown on Arabic television, a masked man representing the group said: 'We have Japanese, Bulgarian, Israeli, American, Spanish and Korean hostages. Their numbers are 30. If America doesn't lift its blockade of Falluja, their heads will be cut off.'
In Tokyo, relatives of three Japanese hostages being held in Iraq issued a desperate plea to their captors yesterday not to carry out their threat to execute them today if Tokyo refuses to withdraw its troops.
Hopes are now rising for the plight of the three. The families said in interviews with al-Arabia and al-Jazeera, the Arabic satellite television stations, that the captives - two aid workers and a freelance journalist - had gone to Iraq in a humanitarian cause and had no interest in politics.
Japanese Foreign Minister Yoriko Kawaguchi is understood to have made a similar plea in a recorded address distributed to major TV networks in Tokyo late last night. A team of Japanese anti-terrorism experts arrived in Amman, the Jordanian capital, on Friday night, but few details emerged of their efforts to contact the hostage-takers.
Hopes for their release rose last night after an aide to Iraq's top Shia religious leader, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, denounced their kidnapping - by a little-known group called Saraya al-Mujahideen - as a 'terrorist' act and demanded their immediate release.
'We demand those kidnappers set them free immediately, for the sake of Iraq's interests. Islam is free of such terrorist acts and the use of violence, especially against women,' said Ayatollah Mohammad Baqer al-Mohri in a sermon on Friday. 'This ugly picture hurts Islam and Muslims, as it gives a bad impression about our Islamic religion.' Al-Jazeera reported last night that the Japanese hostages could be freed within 24 hours.
Pictures last night of two blood-covered bodies were said to be those of two men from the German embassy in Baghdad who went missing on Wednesday on a road near Falluja. The two were embassy guards. German television claimed they were members of Germany's elite anti-terror GSG-9 security force.
The first pictures were released last night of the British man missing for six days, who is believed to be this country's first victim of the hostage-taking spree that has marked the escalation of the conflict in Iraq.
Fears have grown over the fate of Gary Teeley, 37, a British civilian contractor working as a consultant to a Qatari laundry firm in the southern Iraqi city of Nasariya.
Teeley was working at an American airbase near the city. Foreign Office officials confirmed his disappearance last Thursday, but have had no further news.
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,1189963,00.html
Yes - one of the Japanese hostages was studying the effects og the depleted uranium shells used in Iraq I - and II, I am not sure.
Also, a number are supposed to be Chinese, who oppose the war! According to Al Jazeera they were captured in the siege.
Awful stuff, an am awful situation....
My guess is China, unlike the USA, won't stand by with its hands in its pockets, warbling rhetoric. I would not be surprised to hear that China is threatening to nuke Iraq if they don't let their people go.
Well, no news of any such thing so far, thank heavens!
The extent of China's Petroleum reserves
Can China's industrial expansion be sustained without MidEast oil?
I tend to find that premise doubtful.
The "Hydraulic despotism" cited by Frank Herbert is transformed into the contemporary "Petro-producer despotism".
China is hobbled, don't expect any chinese dust-clouds in Iraq in the near future...
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