Hostages: Little time left
2005-12-10 12:43
Baghdad - A chilling deadline to kill four Western hostages was to expire on Saturday amid urgent pleas for their release as chronic insecurity racked Iraq just days before a crucial general election.
Extremists holding the US, British and two Canadian peace activists, extended an ultimatum to murder their captives until Saturday, leaving increasingly panicked relatives none the wiser about their fate.
American Tom Fox, 54, British grandfather Norman Kember, 74, and their Canadian colleagues from the Christian Peacemakers Team, James Loney, 41, and Harmeet Singh Sooden, 32, were kidnapped in Baghdad two weeks ago.
Missing in addition to an abducted German mother, French engineer and an American security contractor, the resurgent hostage crisis underscores the chaos in Iraq ahead of next Thursday's elections to elect a full-term parliament.
The so-called Brigades of the Swords of Righteousness, holding the four Christian peace campaigners, are demanding that London and Washington free all prisoners held in Iraqi and coalition prisons.
Grainy footage showing two men wearing orange jumpsuits similar to those worn by detainees at the US Guantanamo Bay prison, bound by shackles and handcuffs and their faces obscured, was shown on Al-Jazeera late Thursday.
The pan-Arab television station said they were the British and US hostages, as distraught relatives, government officials and religious leaders from around the world demanded their immediate release.
On Saturday, the head of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood movement, Mohammed Mahdi Akef, became the latest dignitary to deliver a stern appeal for their freedom.
"In the name of all Muslim Brothers, I solicit the kidnappers... to let them free without delay, and to safeguard their bodies and souls," he said in a statement issued by the Christian Peacemakers Team (CPT).
"They belong to a Christian organisation that loves peace... The likes of those should be welcomed by the Iraqi people, and their presence should be supported," he added.
CPT colleagues pleaded for mercy, stressing that their colleagues had been working to restore justice and human rights in Iraq.
"There needs to be a force that counters all the resentment, the fear, the intimidation felt by the Iraqi people," said Peggy Gish reading from a text.
"We are trying to be that force, to speak for justice, to advocate for the human rights of Iraqis, to look at an Iraqi face and say: 'My brother, my sister."
In Iraq, their families put a front-page notice in the independent Al-Mashriq newspaper, appealing for information about the hostages' whereabouts and begging for their release as men of peace.
The agony was exacerbated by a claim from a rival Islamic group on Thursday to have killed an American hostage, although there has been no official confirmation of the death of missing contractor Ronald Schulz.