No word on Aus hostage's fate
2005-05-10 14:24
Sydney - No new information on the fate of an Australian held hostage in Iraq has emerged despite the passing of a deadline set by his kidnappers for his country's soldiers to be withdrawn from the country, foreign minister Alexander Downer said on Tuesday.
Douglas Wood, 63, was captured about two weeks ago and since then has appeared in two DVDs, pleading for his life as guns were held close to his head.
In the latest footage, which came to light on Saturday, an exhausted-looking and badly-bruised Wood said he would be killed unless Australia withdrew its troops from Iraq.
"Move out of Iraq or I will be killed," he says.
The deadline expired at 05:00 on Tuesday.
Australia, which has about 550 soldiers in Iraq with 350 more soon to arrive, has rejected the demand, but Downer said there was a possibility that the kidnappers could have extended the deadline.
"No, we haven't heard anything and ... sometimes these deadlines are flexible, sometimes they're not," Downer said on commercial radio.
He said indications were that the people behind the kidnapping, who refer to themselves as the Shura Council of the Mujahedeen of Iraq, were politically driven rather than religious militants.
"It makes a difference whether ... they're Saddam Hussein loyalists, I mean, people from the former special Republican Guard, or whether these people are more driven by religious factors," he said.
'Humanising' Wood
Asked whether the captors seemed religious, Downer replied: "No, they're probably less so."
Frantic efforts to rescue Wood have been under way since the first video was aired, with Canberra sending a team of police and other specialists to negotiate for the contractor's release.
On Monday, Australian Muslims' mufti Sheikh Taj Eldin Al Hilali rushed to Iraq to assist efforts while Wood's family in Australia offered to make a "generous" charitable donation to the Iraqi people should the hostage be freed.
Downer said attempts had been made to "humanise" Wood, who has lived in the United States with his American wife for a decade, in the eyes of his captors. It was also important that the hostage-takers knew that Wood suffered from a heart condition and a bad eye, he said.
"I mean, they may not care so much about the health problems if they're planning to kill him, but certainly if they're thinking of killing him they should think they're not just taking ... an anonymous object out and slaughtering it, they're slaughtering a human being with a family."
The circumstances behind Wood's capture are unknown, but he had been working as a contractor in Iraq for about a year when he was taken hostage.