New call from Sgrena's phone

2005-02-05 18:05

Rome - A colleague of an Italian journalist abducted in Iraq said she received a second call from the cellphone of Giuliana Sgrena on Saturday as Italian authorities stepped up their efforts to secure her release.

Barbara Schiavulli, a colleague of Sgrena working in Baghdad, said she heard no voices - only Arab music playing in the background, said Cristiana Tomei, a colleague of Schiavulli's speaking in Rome.

The call, which arrived shortly after 0600GMT, lasted around 15 seconds, Tomei said.

Sgrena, 56, a reporter for the communist newspaper Il Manifesto, was abducted on Friday by gunmen who blocked her car near Baghdad University.

Schiavulli had been speaking to Sgrena by phone, apparently while the kidnapping was taking place, and heard gunfire in the background.

Italian premier Silvio Berlusconi's government and opposition parties have vowed to work together to secure the release of Sgrena - the first reported kidnapping of a foreigner since Iraq's election last weekend.

Shortly before she was kidnapped, Sgrena had been interviewing people who fled last year's US assault on Fallujah.

Tomei said Schiavulli was working with Italian officials in Baghdad as they seek clues to who could be holding Sgrena. The Italian government has said it believes militants from Iraq's Sunni Muslim minority might be behind the kidnapping.

"We hope that the kidnapping is of a political kind," said Italian Interior Minister Giuseppe Pisanu.

"Giuliana Sgrena was taken close to a Sunni mosque. It is a weak clue. But if it is a political kidnapping, the kidnappers will discover that the journalist is one of those who always sustained their own reasoning," Pisanu said in comments published by Italian newspaper La Stampa.

Il Manifesto strongly opposed the US-led war in Iraq and has fiercely criticised Berlusconi's support and his decision to deploy 3 000 troops in Iraq.

However, Schiavulli said in an article published in the newspaper Avvenire on Saturday that "the hope is that Giuliana has been taken captive by a criminal group looking for a ransom."

The government said it is working on official and unofficial contacts with authorities in Iraq, as well as with representatives of different ethnic, religious and political communities to win the journalist's release.

On Saturday Il Manifesto dedicated its first nine pages to Sgrena, including an interview with Georges Malbrunot, one of two French reporters held hostage in Iraq for four months by Islamic militants in Iraq and released in December.

The paper said it was also preparing a video that it hoped would be broadcast on Arabic news network Al-Jazeera, explaining the paper's opposition to the war.

"It's necessary to spread the message that Giuliana was working for Il Manifesto, a newspaper that was against the war," Malbrunot told the paper, arguing that protests in hostages's home countries could be an important factor in helping secure their release.

- AP