Fallujah 'sealed Hassan's fate'

2004-11-17 16:37

London - A friend of murdered aid worker Margaret Hassan says she wasn't surprised by the news of her death.

Arab satellite station Al-Jazeera on Tuesday said it had received a videotape showing the slaying of a woman believed to be Hassan, but would not broadcast the footage.

"We don't show acts of killing," said Jihad Ballout, Al-Jazeera spokesperson.

"We've never done it before, outside war."

Ballout said the video showed a hooded person firing a pistol into the head of a blindfolded woman, wearing an orange jumpsuit.

Journalist Felicity Arbuthnot, who was a close friend of Margaret's for the last 15 years, told the BBC she was appalled at the apparent murder.

'I knew she was dead'

"As soon as the Blackwatch went up to the Letizia region and the onslaught of Fallujah started, where Iraqi deaths aren't even counted, I knew she was dead. I just knew," she said.

"Iraq is very closeknit, complex, very loving, but not if you invade the society.

"I just felt that whoever was holding her, once people started being indiscriminately slaughtered in the name of democracy, what was one life going to mean?

"I just knew she was dead. That was it."

Hassan was presumed to be the first foreign female to have been murdered in Iraq amidst a recent wave of hostage-taking in the country.

In Ireland, where Hassan was born, mourning relatives gathered for a memorial service at a Roman Catholic church in Kenmare, in the southwest of the country, where a candle had been lit each day for her.

Opponent of the US invasion

Hassan was among the best known victims in a scourge of kidnappings that has plagued Iraq in recent months, but her case was markedly different to those of foreign journalists and contractors more commonly targeted.

She had been an aid worker in Iraq for more than 25 years, and a vehement and vocal opponent of last year's US-led war to topple Saddam Hussein and the crippling sanctions that preceded it for more than a decade.

A fluent Arabic speaker who held British, Irish and Iraqi citizenship, Hassen went to New York in January 2003 to warn the UN Security Council of the "humanitarian catastrophe" that she feared could follow a war.

Her kidnapping sparked an outpouring of sympathy from Iraqi civilians, who called for her release and held a rally in Baghdad with banners referring to her as "Mama Margaret". - AFP/BBC/AP

- News24