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Brown: Free kidnapped Britons
09/12/2007 14:27 - (SA)
London - British Prime Minister Gordon Brown on Sunday demanded the release of five Britons being held hostage by an Iraqi Shiite group.
Brown said his government would do everything in its power to win the freedom of the four security guards and one computer expert who were seized from a government compound in Baghdad about six months ago.
The men's captors released a videotape of one of the five victims Tuesday coupled with the demand that Britain pull all its forces from Iraq. It was the first public proof that any of them were alive.
"We will do everything in our power to secure our objective, which is the immediate release of the hostages," Brown said in a televised statement. "(Iraqi) Prime Minister (Nouri al-)Maliki and his ministers and others are doing a tremendous amount to secure the release of the hostages and I want to thank them for what they have done."
The kidnapping took place on May 29, when about 40 gunmen in police uniforms and driving vehicles used by Iraqi security forces grabbed the men from an Iraqi Finance Ministry compound. Suspicion has fallen on Shiite splinter groups that the United States believes have been trained and funded by Iran.
The video was posted as Britain prepares to hand over security control of oil-rich Basra province - the last of four regions of southern Iraq it occupied after the 2003 invasion - to the Iraqis in mid-December.
British troops withdrew in September from their last base in Basra city to an airport garrison on the outskirts, and half the 5 000 British troops in Iraq are due to go home by the spring.
Four of those abducted were security workers for the Montreal-based firm GardaWorld; the fifth was an employee of BearingPoint, a McLean, Virginia-based management consulting firm.
BearingPoint has been working in Iraq since 2003 on a U.S. Agency for International Development-funded contract to support economic recovery and reform.
- AP
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