Amnesty condemns beheading
2004-05-12 18:34
London - Amnesty International condemned the videotaped beheading in Iraq of American civilian Nick Berg, an act which Prime Minister Tony Blair's office described on Wednesday as "barbaric." But Iranian radio accused Western media of using the slaying to distract attention from the abuse of prisoners in Iraq.
Images from the film showing Berg and his captors just before the killing dominated TV broadcasts and newspaper front pages in many countries.
A Kuwaiti newspaper ran a picture of one of the killers holding the severed head and some Greek TV stations showed the actual execution, although they obscured the head. The full video was posted on an al-Qaeda linked website.
"Such acts are unjustifiable under any circumstances and constitute a serious crime under international law" London-based human rights group Amnesty International said of the slaying. "Those responsible should be brought to justice in line with international standards."
The masked men who killed Berg claimed they were angered by coalition abuses of Iraqi prisoners. The video, posted on Tuesday, showed them pushing Berg to the floor, severing his head and holding it up. His body was found near a highway overpass in Baghdad on Saturday, the same day he was beheaded, a US official said.
The video bore the title "Abu Musab al-Zarqawi shown slaughtering an American," referring to an associate of Osama bin Laden believed responsible for a wave of suicide bombings in Iraq.
"Too cruel to show"
Broadcasters in Britain, China, Germany, Italy and Belgium showed images of Berg kneeling on the floor with his black-clad captors standing behind him.
"What follows is too cruel to show," said Belgium's VRT public broadcaster, which aired the video up to the point where Berg was thrown to the ground after one attacker took out a knife.
Iranian radio accused the western media of showing pictures from the video for propaganda purposes.
"As a result, the issue of Iraqi prisoners' torture has been totally ignored by these media," the Voice of the Islamic Republic of Iran said.
"The American authorities too, have entered this news-making propaganda. These authorities have described the killing method of the American national as loathsome, and implicitly indicated that the American troops were justified to torture Iraqi prisoners."
Arab media reacted cautiously to the execution, with some newspapers conspicuously playing it down or even ignoring it.
Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya, the big two satellite networks, aired edited snippets of the video. "The news story itself is strong enough," said Jihad Ballout, spokesperson for Qatar-based Al-Jazeera television. "To show the actual beheading is out of the realm of decency."
Egypt's leading daily, Al-Ahram, ignored the beheading on Wednesday. An editor said the news came too late for the paper to confirm the video's authenticity with the US government.
Newspapers in Syria, where the government controls the press tightly, did not report the execution at all.
- AP