Iraq detainees release may help free kidnapped US reporter

By Jay Deshmukh
AFP
BAGHDAD
Petroleumworld.com 01 26 06

Iraq was to release women detainees from the infamous Abu Ghraib prison on Thursday in a move which might help free a US reporter abducted by insurgents, one of a number of foreigners taken hostage in recent weeks.

An Iraqi justice ministry official said 424 detainees were to be freed Thursday following a review of their cases by a joint Iraqi-US board. These would include five of the eight women known to be held by US forces.

The kidnappers of US journalist Jill Carroll, seized on a Baghdad street on January 7, have threatened to kill her unless all Iraqi women detainees are set free.
The official denied that the release of the women had anything to do with kidnappers' demands, and US forces have stressed they do not negotiate with hostage-takers.

But a recent spike in hostage-taking of foreigners has embarrassed the government.

"Government services are doing all they can to free people kidnapped and detained," President Jalal Talabani's office said Wednesday, quoting minister for national security Abdul Karim al-Anizi who met the president.

More than 250 foreigners have been seized since the March 2003 US-led invasion which toppled dictator Saddam Hussein. A number of them, including Westerners, have been killed.
US and Iraqi forces are searching for two German engineers, Rene Braunlich and Thomas Nilzchke, the most recent kidnap victims, seized at gunpoint on Tuesday by men posing as Iraqi soldiers outside an oil refinery in Baiji, northern Iraq.

"We are trying at the moment to obtain any information possible," German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said in Berlin, adding that no contact had been established with the captors yet.

Two Kenyan telecommunications engineers were abducted last week after their bodyguards were gunned down in Baghdad and there was still no news on the fate of four Western peace activists seized in November.

Meanwhile, a Jordanian hostage said in a videotape his captors had set a new deadline to execute him.

The recent spate of hostage-taking, which could be politically or simply financially motivated, comes as Iraqi political parties jockey for position ahead of official talks on forming a broad-based government.

Washington hopes the new government, to be set up in the wake of the December 15 elections, will include representatives of the Sunni Arab minority, a move which could undermine the ongoing insurgency.

Sunni representatives, at a meeting with Shiite leaders, Wednesday insisted however that moves towards greater federalism should be shelved as a price of their joining the new government.

"It (federalism) can be postponed to the next assembly," Sunni leader Sala al-Mutlak proposed in an interview with AFP.

The Sunnis fear that a fully federal Iraq might rob them of the country's vast oil wealth which is concentrated in the mainly Shiite south and in the Kurdish north.

Meanwhile, in the south, British military spokesman Major Peter Cripps said five Iraqi policemen from the serious crimes squad were being held on suspicion of involvement "in a number of murders in the northern part of Basra, which were either politically or financially motivated."

A total of 137 policemen in the port city have been sacked over the past two months after a probe launched to look into various allegations of corruption in the internal affairs department of the interior ministry, a US official said.

Relations between British forces and Basra authorities have deteriorated since September, when police-linked Shiite militiamen arrested two British soldiers working undercover.

That set off a riot in which some troops were attacked and injured.

British troops then smashed their way into the Basra police station to secure the release of the two soldiers who were later found to be held in a house nearby.

Britain has some 8,000 troops stationed in southern Iraq, where they have seen much less trouble than the US military in the restive Sunni provinces in the west and centre of the country.

In violence on Wednesday, a booby-trapped motorbike blew up in Baghdad, wounding two policemen.

The US military said an American marine was killed by small-arms fire Tuesday in the western province of Al-Anbar. His death brought the number of US military personnel killed since the invasion to at least 2,239.

AFP 01/25/06

Copyright © 2006 AFP. All rights reserved

 

 

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