Hunt on for kidnapped journo

2006-01-10 11:50

Ammar Karim

Baghdad - Iraqi and United States investigators were hunting on Tuesday for an American journalist kidnapped in Baghdad as a French hostage who escaped after five weeks of captivity in Iraq arrived back in France.

Reports said gunmen seized Jill Carroll, 28, a freelance reporter working for the Christian Science Monitor, on Saturday after calling by the office of a prominent Sunni politician.

Her interpreter, Allan Enwiyah, 32, was shot dead and his body abandoned nearby by the kidnappers, while her driver got away.

Monitor editor Richard Bergenheim said: "We are urgently seeking information about Ms Carroll and are pursuing every avenue to secure her release."

Westerners held hostage

Carroll's driver said gunmen jumped in front of the car, pulled him from it, and drove off with their two captives all within 15 seconds.

Insurgents in Iraq, including an American, a Briton and two Canadians who were members of a Christian peace group, were holding several Westerners hostage.

According to watchdog group, Reporters without Borders, Carroll was the 31st media worker to have been kidnapped in Iraq since the start of the war in 2003.

Their abductors killed five of the kidnapped victims - four Iraqis and Enzo Baldoni of Italy. The others were released.

Blanche escapes from farmhouse

Frenchman Bernard Planche, a 52-year-old engineer, managed to evade his captors on Saturday.

He arrived at a military base in France, where his daugher and niece, along with foreign minister Philippe Douste-Blazy, met him.

Blanche, who escaped from a farmhouse west of the capital, said he was "delighted to return to civilisation and to French soil".

The hostage developments followed a twin suicide bombing against the Iraqi interior ministry that killed at least 28 policemen.

The Iraqi branch of al-Qaeda claimed responsibility for the attack in an internet message, saying it was to avenge the "torture" of Sunni Muslims in interior ministry facilities.

Some inmates 'tortured'

Abuse scandals came to the fore in November and December after US and Iraqi forces discovered two overcrowded interior ministry detention centres. Some inmates had reportedly been tortured.

In Washington, the White House on Monday denied that the US government had been negotiating with insurgents and Saddam Hussein loyalists in Iraq, but acknowledged that it was reaching out to those who until now had rejected the political process.

Scott McClellan of the White House said: "Part of our strategy, a critical element of our strategy, is to broaden participation in the political process. We have been reaching out to the rejectionists."

McClellan was reacting to a New York Times report that said the US had stepped up contact with some Iraqi insurgent groups in a bid to exploit tensions between home-grown rebels and foreign militant groups such as al-Qaeda.

- AFP