Journo abducted in gunfight

2005-02-04 22:41

Baghdad - Insurgents are launching new attacks across Iraq and battling security troops in scattered clashes following the easing of security measures that had been in place to guard last weekend's elections. At least 33 people have been killed in violence since Wednesday night.

In new violence, gunmen kidnapped an Italian journalist in a hail of gunfire from a central Baghdad street where she had been conducting interviews.

Two US soldiers were killed and eight wounded by roadside bombs in northern Iraq, and an Iraqi contractor working with the American military was gunned down in a drive-by shooting west of the capital.

In Baghdad, Giuliana Sgrena, a journalist for the Italian newspaper Il Manifesto, was kidnapped by gunmen who blocked her car near the Baghdad University compound, police said.

She had gone to interview refugees from Fallujah and then went on to Friday prayer services at a nearby mosque, colleague Barbara Schiavulli, an Italian radio journalist, told reporters.

Schiavulli said she received a call from Sgrena's cellphone when the kidnapping was apparently under way. "I couldn't hear anyone talking. I heard people shooting" and the sound of people splashing through the puddles left by a heavy overnight rain, Schiavulli said.

"I kept saying, 'Giuliana, Giuliana,' and no answer," Schiavulli said.

Repeated calls after to Sgrena's cellphone went unanswered, until a final call, when someone answered without speaking, then hung up, Schiavulli said. The missing woman's cell phone then went dead.

Sgrena's Iraqi translator and a security guard at the university said the kidnappers appeared to have been waiting for her, blocking her path with a car. University security guards opened fire at the kidnappers, who dragged Sgrena into a vehicle and sped away. An Italian diplomat said about eight kidnappers were involved in the assault.

Sgrena is at least the second Italian journalist kidnapped in Iraq, and at least the ninth Italian citizen seized in Iraq in recent months. Freelance Italian journalist Enzo Baldoni was abducted and killed in August.

Meanwhile, in Mosul, a US military Stryker combat vehicle rolled over several anti-tank mines on Thursday, killing an American soldier and injuring another. Another US soldier died on Friday when a roadside bomb hit a patrol near Beiji, north of Baghdad. Seven soldiers were wounded, the U.S. military said.

West of the capital on Friday, an Iraqi contractor was gunned down by assailants who pulled up next to his car on the dangerous desert highway to Baghdad International Airport. The man was in charge of a road construction project inside the airport complex that was contracted by the American military, said Iraqi police.

Overnight in northern Baghdad, gunmen entered a Shiite mosque, ordered several guards to leave the building and then rigged it with explosives, area residents said. The blast blew a hole in one wall of the Tawhid Mosque.

- AP