Hostages plead for their lives
2004-07-22 11:59
Baghdad - A video purportedly of seven foreign truck drivers held in Iraq by a group calling itself the "Black Flags" showed one of the hostages making a desperate appeal for their lives to be spared.
The seven shown in the video were said to be three Kenyans, three Indians and an Egyptian. The recording could not be authenticated.
"We want to go home, please help us so that we are not cut up into pieces because then you would bear the guilt of orphaning our children," said one of the hostages in the footage.
Arab satellite television network Al-Arabiya on Wednesday broadcast a video by the same group showing six hostages - three Indians, two Kenyans and an Indian - whom they threatened to kill if their Kuwaiti employer did not withdraw from Iraq.
The footage shows a burly, bearded man wearing a white shirt with a white undershirt standing against a white wall.
"We work for KGL and we were captured in, yes... we were arrested...please release us, and I swear to God that aiding the Americans is wrong,' said the man hesitantly, speaking in Arabic with an Egyptian accent.
"We want to go back home, we entered Kuwait in an illegal way, I swear to God," he said in the recording.
"Let the Egyptians know that I came (to Kuwait) on a three-month visa and they forced us to work with the Americans and the Jews," he said, begging to be allowed to go home to his mother and brothers.
The Egyptian man then stopped and told his colleague standing next to him to speak, but then he was commanded by an unidentified voice to continue.
"The sheikhs and the powerful bosses took us and left our trailers in one place," he said, describing the abduction.
"They led us to another place, where they are feeding us and providing us with water while they decide whether we are guilty."
The man, wiping heavy sweat from his face, vowed to never enter Iraq or Kuwait again or to work for the US forces.
News of the latest kidnapping came even before a freed Philippine hostage, held in captivity for almost two weeks, arrived home.
Only two days ago, another kidnapped trucker from Egypt, Sayed Mohammed Sayed al-Garbawi, was set free after his employer - a Saudi company - agreed to end all its activities in Iraq.
- AFP