Aussie hostage 'still alive'
2005-05-06 13:59
Sydney - An Australian citizen held hostage in Iraq is still alive, Prime Minister John Howard said on Friday as it emerged that an influential Sunni sheik has pleaded with the militants holding him to spare his life.
Howard said the government believed that engineer Douglas Wood, who was filmed begging pleading for his life in a DVD released on Sunday, was still alive but that he did not want to comment on details.
"We are doing everything we can to secure his release - it's very hard," Howard said on local radio.
"We believe he's still alive ... the problem with this if you talk too much about it, you inevitably get into the area of speculation.
"When... attempts are being made at different levels to try and secure his release, it is a case of the less said the better."
Howard refused to comment on who the Australian government was using as intermediaries in Iraq to plead with the kidnappers, who have identified themselves as the Shura Council of the Mujahedeen of Iraq.
Alive last Wednesday
But the Sydney Morning Herald reported Friday that influential Sunni figure, Sheik Hassan Zadaan, had spoken to the radical insurgent cell holding Wood and that the hostage had been alive as recently as last Wednesday.
Wood's captors had pushed for the engineer to be put to death but Zadaan, a former general in Saddam Hussein's army and now nominated to be one of Iraq's deputy prime ministers, argued that the hostage was a "small-time Australian contractor" and not an employee of a big US corporation or the military, the newspaper said.
"I told them this man is not a spy and even though he worked for (US construction giant) Bechtel in the past, he now ran his own business," Zadaan was quoted as saying.
Zadaan would not confirm whether he had seen Wood or where the meeting with his captors took place but he said the hostage, who has a heart condition and a bad eye, was otherwise in good health.
He said he was confident that Wood would be released but acknowledged that the kidnappers had killed other foreigners and were possibly aligned to Al-Qaeda-linked Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. He described them as "very difficult people".
But he said a plea broadcast on Al-Jazeera television by Wood's brothers, urging the hostage to shut down his business and leave Iraq was an important gesture.
In the DVD released by the hostage-takers on Sunday, Wood pleaded for Australia, the United States and Britain to withdraw their military forces from Iraq so that his captors would not kill him.
Howard immediately rejected the insurgents' demand.
Canberra hopes to secure the release of Wood, who has lived in the United States for a decade and is married to an American woman, via the intervention of a task force of negotiators, including police and military personnel, sent to Baghdad this week.
Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said Friday that the government was "optimistic that we can still succeed but there is still a long way to go".
"We just can't be sure but we haven't given up hope," he told ABC radio.
"We have no information that he is dead."