Hope for US hostage

2006-01-26 16:17

Baghdad - More than 400 detainees being held in Iraqi and US-run prisons, including five women, were released on Thursday in a move which could help free abducted US reporter Jill Carroll.

"We have released 419 detainees today including five women," a spokesperson for the US detention facilities in Iraq told AFP.

A justice ministry official earlier said a total of 424 detainees were to be freed from Baghdad's notorious Abu Ghraib jail and other prisons following a review of their cases by a joint Iraqi-US board.

They included five of the nine women known to be held by US forces.

Pan-Arab television station Al-Jazeera said last week that the kidnappers of 28-year-old Carroll had threatened to kill her unless all female detainees held by US forces in Iraq were set free.

While Iraqi and US officials have denied that the releases have anything to do with Carroll's case, there is hope the move might help her regardless.

250 foreigners kidnapped

Carroll was abducted on January 7 in Baghdad, one of the nearly 250 foreigners seized in Iraq since the March 2003 US-led invasion, in a recent surge in hostage-takings in the violence-wracked country.

US and Iraqi forces are searching for two German engineers, Rene Braunlich and Thomas Nilzchke, the most recent kidnap victims, seized at gunpoint on Tuesday by men posing as Iraqi soldiers outside an oil refinery in Baiji, northern Iraq.

"We are trying at the moment to obtain any information possible," German foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said in Berlin, adding that no contact had been established with the captors yet.

A delegation of Kenyan Muslims is planning to visit Iraq to plead for the release of two Kenyan telecommunications engineers who were abducted last week after their bodyguards were gunned down in Baghdad.

There was also no news on the fate of four Western peace activists seized in November, while the status of a Jordanian hostage is unknown after a videotape from his captors set a new deadline to execute him.

The spate of hostage-taking, which could be politically or simply financially motivated, comes as political parties jockey for position ahead of official talks on forming a broad-based government to rule the country for the next four years.

- AFP