BAGHDAD, 22 September 2004 — A second American hostage was killed yesterday by a group linked to Al-Qaeda as a 24-hour deadline set by it for the United States to free Iraqi women in US-run prisons ran out.
“The nation’s zealous sons slaughtered the second American hostage... after the end of the deadline... We will provide you with film of the slaughter soon, God willing,” said a statement, posted under the pseudonym Abu Maysara Al-Iraqi on a website.
Al-Iraqi has posted past statements on behalf of Tawhid wal Jihad, a militant group led by Jordanian Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi.
A similar announcement posted by Al-Iraqi preceded the Monday night’s release of graphic footage of the beheading of American construction engineer Eugene Armstrong. Yesterday’s statement did not identify the latest victim by name, but militants said during the video of Armstrong’s killing that they would kill within 24 hours another of the two hostages abducted with him — American Jack Hensley or Briton Kenneth Bigley.
Hensley is from the US state of Georgia.
Armstrong’s body had been found Monday in western Baghdad hours before the news of his beheading became public.
Later a statement on the group’s website said it would kill Bigley unless its demands were met. “The British hostage will meet the same fate if the British government does not do what must be done to release him.”
Earlier, the son of Bigley begged Prime Minister Tony Blair to save his life. “I ask Tony Blair personally to consider the amount of bloodshed already suffered,” Craig Bigley said on BBC television. “Only you can save him now ... Please meet the demands and release my father — two women for two men.”The US Central Intelligence Agency determined with a “high degree of confidence” that Zarqawi was the masked militant who read out the lengthy statement before drawing a knife and beheading Armstrong.
The US military says no women are being held in the two prisons run by it — Abu Ghraib in Baghdad and Um Qasr in Basra — but that two are in US custody and are accused of working on ousted Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s weapons program.
The US military said insurgents attacked Abu Ghraib late on Monday with mortars and heavy machine-gun fire, killing an inmate.
A Turkish construction company announced that it was freezing its activities in Iraq after 10 of its workers were taken hostage. Al-Jazeera reported Saturday that a group calling itself the “Salafist Brigade Abu Bakr Al-Seddiq” kidnapped 10 employees of the Ankara-based Vinsan company and threatened to kill them unless the firm halted its operations in Iraq within three days.
In a separate development, US Marines arrested two close aides and several supporters of Moqtada Sadr in a predawn raid on the cleric’s office in Najaf. “A group of US Marines raided the office of Sayed Sadr at 2 a.m. and arrested Sheikh Ahmed Al-Shaibany, Sayed Hosam Al-Husseini and a number of other workers in the office,” said Abu Sadeq Al-Adhari, an official in Sadr’s office. Iraqi police and security forces were seen blocking access to the office which is near the Imam Ali Mosque.
— Additional input from agencies
