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B N W: Biafra Nigeria World News |
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Relatives of hostages plead as gunmen kill clerics in Iraq
WITH the spectre of grisly death hanging on two Americans and a Briton, their relatives yesterday appealed to their captors, the Tawhid and Jihad group for mercy.
The Americans, Jack Hensley and Eugene Armstrong and Briton Kenneth Bigley are being held hostage by the Tawhid and Jihad group led by suspected Jordanian terror mastermind Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
The group threatened to behead them within 48 hours unless Iraqi women were released from two United States-controlled prisons in Iraq.
The appeals came amid the assassination in Baghdad of two clerics from a powerful Sunni Muslims group opposed to the U.S. presence in Iraq.
The threat to behead the three foreigners threat came in a video released on Saturday, which showed the three contractors blindfolded and said they would be killed in 48 hours, though no exact time for the deadline was given. The three construction contractors were snatched on Thursday from their Baghdad home.
The British government and Bigley's brother, Philip, appealed for their release in statements broadcast repeatedly yesterday on the Arab satellite television station, Al-Arabiya.
"Ken has enjoyed working in the Arab world for the last 10 years in civil engineering and has many Arabic friends and is understanding and appreciative of the Islamic culture," said Philip Bigley.
"He wanted to help the ordinary Iraqi people and is just doing his job," he said. "At the end of the day, we just want him home safe and well, especially for my mum Lil."
Hensley's wife, Patty, appeared on the Arab television station Al-Jazeera and said her husband, like all Americans in Iraq, was there to help the Iraqi people.
The appeals came a day after another group posted a video on the Internet showing the beheading of three other hostages - said to be Iraqi Kurd militiamen. The bodies of the three were later found by a road outside the northern city of Mosul.
Tawhid and Jihad has claimed responsibility for the slaying of three hostages in the past, including the beheading of American Nicholas Berg, who was abducted in April. The group has also said it is behind a number of bombings and gun attacks.
In the latest kidnapping, it is demanding the release of Iraqi women from Abu Ghraib and Umm Qasr prisons. Abu Ghraib is the prison where U.S. soldiers were photographed sexually humiliating male prisoners. The U.S. military says no women are held at either facility, though it says it is holding two female "security prisoners" elsewhere.
Insurgents waging a 17-month campaign of violence against U.S. and Iraqi forces have used kidnappings and spectacular bombings as their weapons of choice to undermine the interim government of Prime Minister Ayad Allawi and push the U.S. out of Iraq.
It was not immediately known who was behind the gunning-down of two Sunni clerics on Sunday night and yesterday in Baghdad. The two clerics belonged to the Association of Moslem Scholars, a grouping of conservative clerics that opposes the U.S. presence in Iraq and has emerged as a powerful representative of Iraq's Sunni minority.
Gunmen shot and killed Sheik Mohammed Jadoa al-Janabi as he entered a Mosque in Baghdad's predominantly Shiite al-Baya neighborhood to perform noon prayers yesterday, the association said.
The previous night, gunmen attacked the car of Sheik Hazem al-Zeidi as he left a mosque in another largely Shiite neighborhood of Baghdad, Sadr City. Al-Zeidi was killed and two of his bodyguards were taken hostage for several hours before being released yesterday, said Sheik Abdul-Sattar Abdul-Jabbar, a senior member of the association.
Sadr City has a Shiite Moslem majority, but Sunni Muslims have at least 10 Mosques in the neighborhood.
There have been tit-for-tat killings of Shiite and Sunni clerics in the past year, widely believed to be motivated by sectarian sentiments. However, the embattled police never thoroughly investigate such murders.
In Baghdad, where Shiites and Sunnis are roughly equal in number, attacks have taken place against places of worship belonging to both communities.
The association is believed to have contacts with Sunni insurgents and has interceded often in the past to win the release of foreign hostages.
More than 100 foreigners have been kidnapped in Iraq, some for lucrative ransoms, and at least 26 of them have been executed. At least five other Westerners are currently being held hostage, including an Iraqi-American man, two female Italian aid workers and two French reporters.
In the southern Shiite holy city of Najaf, a spokesman of renegade Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr called for the release of 18 Iraqi National Guard members, purportedly kidnapped by masked gunmen who are demanding the release of a detained al-Sadr aide.
"Muqtada al-Sadr denounced... the kidnapping," said Sheik Ahmed al-Shaibany. "Al-Sadr appealed to the hostage-takers to free them immediately." He said al-Sadr's followers had nothing to do with the kidnapping.
Al-Jazeera aired a video on Saturday from a group calling itself the Brigades of Mohammed bin Abdullah showing men in military dress sitting on the floor with their heads bowed. Militants stood behind them pointing guns to their heads.
No audio was aired, but Al-Jazeera's announcer said the militants threatened to kill the 18 unless al-Sadr's aide, Hazem al-A'araji, is freed within 48 hours. U.S. and Iraqi forces detained al-A'araji in a raid on al-Sadr's Baghdad offices.
It was not clear where the hostages were taken or when the deadline expires.
Elsewhere, explosions rocked the northern part of Fallujah, killing two people and wounding three, hospital officials said.
The cause of the blasts was not immediately known but a U.S. warplane was seen flying over the city, where American forces have frequently carried out airstrikes targeting hideouts of the Tawhid and Jihad group.
Dhia Adel of Fallujah General Hospital said the two killed and three wounded were City Municipal employees using a bulldozer to work on construction projects near the Fallujah railway station.
U.S. jets have repeatedly targeted cranes and bulldozers on the edge of the city after intelligence showed they were being used by militants to build fortified positions. American troops have not entered Fallujah since ending a three-week siege of the city in April that left hundreds dead.
Some 300 people have been killed in escalating violence over the past week, including bombings, street fighting and U.S. airstrikes. Despite the unrelenting violence, Allawi said on Sunday that his interim government was determined "to stick to the timetable of the elections," which are due by January 31.
"We are adamant that democracy is going to prevail, is going to win in Iraq," Allawi told reporters after a meeting with British leader Tony Blair in London.
Allawi, a secular Shiite Muslim, has been insistent about holding elections on time because of pressure from Iraq's majority Shiite community and its most powerful cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who fears the interim arrangement will be prolonged.
Last week, United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan warned there could not be "credible elections if the security conditions continue as they are now."
Several cities in the Sunni Muslim heartland north and west of Baghdad are out of U.S. and Iraqi government control, with insurgents holding sway.`
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