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Severed fingers sent to US army
13/03/2008 21:35 - (SA)
Miami - Severed fingers of five Western contractors were sent to the US military in Iraq, giving the men's relatives hope that they are still alive, a brother of one of the missing men said.
The men were abducted in two separate incidents that occurred a month and a half apart more than two years ago, a US government official said Thursday in Washington.
The Austrian weekly magazine News first reported the delivery of the five fingers in Wednesday's edition, citing unidentified authorities working on the case.
Patrick Reuben, a Minneapolis police officer whose twin brother, Paul Reuben, is among the missing, said late Wednesday the FBI told his family members that "the fingers were confirmed to be those of the hostages".
Patrick Reuben said the news of the severed fingers was "shocking," but that the initial word the family got was "much more serious than that. Later on we found that it was fingers that were recovered and that the DNA confirmed it was the hostages."
Four of the men were guards for a convoy ambushed near the Kuwaiti border on November 16, 2006. The fifth, Ronald J. Withrow, 40, of Lubbock, Texas, was a contractor working for JPI Worldwide and abducted on January 5, 2007 near Basra.
In addition to Reuben, those abducted in the earlier incident were Jonathon Cote, 25, of Getzville, New York; Joshua Munns, 25, of Redding, California; and Bert Nussbaumer, 26, of Vienna, Austria, said the US government official in Washington. The official spoke only on condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to speak on the record about the matter.
A fifth hostage taken in the November 16, 2006 ambush was John Young, 45, of Lee's Summit, Missouri. None of his fingers was sent to the US military.
In a statement, the FBI declined to confirm the men had been identified by fingers.
The father of Cote said he and other families were visited by the FBI two to three weeks ago, when they were told DNA samples had been identified as those of the hostages. The agents would not say how they had gotten the samples.
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