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Journo faced 'mock executions'
15/08/2004 08:15 - (SA)
London - A young British journalist kidnapped for 20 hours in the southern Iraqi city of Basra revealed on Sunday that he had been subjected to a series of terrifying mock executions by his captors.
Writing in the Sunday Telegraph, freelancer James Brandon, 23, said four men took turns putting guns to his head and pulling the trigger, as his captors demanded to know if he was an American or an Israeli spy.
"All I could feel was the cold steel of the muzzle of one of my abductors' pistols being pressed to my temple," wrote Brandon in a copyright "world exclusive" on page one of the conservative newspaper.
"Then came a chilling silence ... broken only, seconds later, by the terrifying metal click of the trigger being pulled."
Brandon was abducted at gunpoint from his hotel on Thursday in Basra, where British forces in southern Iraq are based, against the backdrop of a fierce US assault in Najaf on radical Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr and his Mahdi militia.
He was set free the next day, looking timid and bruised, as he was paraded before reporters at Sadr's office in Basra after the cleric appealed to his captors to let him go.
In the Sunday Telegraph, Brandon wrote that he was taken from his hotel room by about eight men who pistol-whipped him around the head, resulting in a wound that bled as he was hustled down the stairs.
"There wasn't really time for terror," he said. "When the assult actually happened, I couldn't really claim it was totally unexpected. After all, this was Iraq."
He said he was put in a car, blindfolded, then driven around Basra, during which he was repeatedly asked who he was - he kept replying in Arabic "sahafi," or journalist, working for the Sunday Telegraph.
"I assumed that once they knew I was a journalist, they would set me free," he said, but instead he was subjected to the mock executions.
Sometime after midnight, he said, he was manhandled into a house, and his hands and legs were tied up. "I assumed I was going to be killed," he said.
Left alone in a kitchen, he said he managed to work off the blindfold, then hobbled to the sink where he found a knife that he gingerly used to cut the ropes around his wrists and ankles.
He said he then attempted to escape the house - frightening a woman in the hallway in the process.
"In an Indiana Jones moment, I grabbed her by the neck, slammed her head against the wall, pressed my knife to her throat and hissed at her: 'Help me or I will kill you'," he said.
But he was caught at the gate by Mahdi militiamen, beaten again, then forced to go in front of a video camera. It was then that one of the captors said he would be executed if the US assault against Sadr in Najaf did not stop.
It was well after dawn when the tone of his captors began to change, with one of them feeding him biscuits and saying "we are Muslims," before he was told he would be taken back to his hotel - only to turn up at Sadr's Basra office instead.
- AFP
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