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Iraq hostages plead for their lives
Posted by Tiglath (Guest) davidchibo@hotmail.com - Sunday, September 19 2004, 7:57:01 (CEST)
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Iraq hostages plead for their lives

Captors give 48 hours to meet demands

Luke Harding in Baghdad
Sunday September 19, 2004
The Observer

Looking tired and defeated, the British hostage Kenneth Bigley pleaded for his life on videotape yesterday, two days after a shadowy Iraqi militant group kidnapped him and two Americans in Baghdad.
In a tape shown by the Arabic TV station al-Jazeera, Bigley's captors yesterday said they would execute him and the American hostages, Jack Hensley and Eugene Armstrong, within 48 hours, unless the US freed Iraqi women prisoners.

The men, who were seized last Thursday from their house in Baghdad's affluent Mansur district, appear to be in the hands of Iraq's militant Tawhid and Jihad group, which has been linked to the radical Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, whom the US accuses of plotting numerous terrorist attacks in Iraq and says is allied to al-Qaeda.

'The Tawhid and Jihad group gave a 48-hour deadline for the release of the women prisoners in return for releasing the two Americans and Briton kidnapped on Thursday, or they would implement the death penalty against them,' al-Jazeera said. The women should be freed from Abu Ghraib prison and Umm Qasr, another US jail near British-occupied Basra .

But it was not clear last night whether the demand was a real one - or a cynical attempt to manipulate Iraqi public opinion, already deeply hostile to the occupation. The last female detainee in Abu Ghraib, Huda Alazawi, a Sunni businesswoman wrongly accused of funding Iraq's resistance, was released on 19 July, The Observer can reveal.

There are currently only two women left in US custody in Iraq - both of them senior scientists who worked on Saddam's alleged weapons of mass destruction programme. They are being held with 100 other so-called 'high-value' detainees at Baghdad International Airport.

In the video, the three hostages are shown wearing white blindfolds and slumped on the floor of a plain white room. They appear to murmur their names one by one, while a black-hooded man points a gun at the head of one of them.

Although the video gives no clues, the hostages are almost certainly being held in Falluja, the Sunni militant stronghold west of Baghdad, and the apparent centre of Iraq's burgeoning kidnapping industry.

On Friday, the family of Mr Bigley, a 62-year-old engineer working for Gulf Supplies and Commercial Services, a United Arab Emirates-based firm, called for his release.

There has been no word, meanwhile, on the fate of two Italian aid workers Simona Pari and Simona Torretta, seized two weeks ago. It is also unclear whether two French journalists, Christian Chesnot and Georges Malbrunot, kidnapped on 20 August, are still alive, although a report yesterday suggested the group holding them might release them. Over the past six months more than 100 foreigners have been seized in Iraq, and at least 30 have been killed.

The demand by Tawhid and Jihad that the US should free Iraqi women prisoners follows overwhelming evidence that US guards at Abu Ghraib sexually abused some Iraqi women prisoners - the ultimate taboo in a conservative Islamic society. In the US military's own investigation into the scandal, which broke in April, Maj Gen Antonio Taguba found that a US military policeman had raped a female detainee, while witnesses who spoke to The Observer claim that a 14-year-old girl was 'repeatedly' raped by US soldiers last year.

In a note smuggled out of the jail last December, one woman prisoner, Noor, said several women were pregnant after being raped by US guards. She urged the Iraqi resistance to bomb the prison to spare the women 'further shame'. Other women released from Abu Ghraib have disappeared. Iraqi human rights groups believe their families may have murdered them because of the stigma of suspected American sexual abuse.

The two women still in US custody are Rihab Taha, a British-educated microbiologist who was in charge of Iraq's alleged biological weapons programme in the late 1980s, and Huda Amash, another scientist involved in Iraq's weapons programme. The US authorities have refused to release Amash, despite the fact she is suffering from breast cancer.

Earlier this month, Jeffrey Miller, the general sent by Washington to Iraq in the wake of the Abu Ghraib scandal, said the US was currently holding 5,000 Iraqi detainees, 2,400 in Abu Ghraib, 2,500 in Umm Qasr, and 100 at Baghdad airport. Several hundred were released last week. The prisoners are being held without charge, without access to a lawyer, and in defiance of the Geneva Conventions.



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