BAGHDAD, 2 November 2004 — One US citizen and five other employees of a Saudi trading company were kidnapped in Baghdad yesterday, plunging the country further into crisis on the eve of the US presidential elections.
Gunmen barged into the offices of the Saudi Arabian Trading and Contracting Company (SATCO) in the smart Mansour district at 5:35 p.m. (1435 GMT), shooting dead one Iraqi guardsman and kidnapping three others along with a US citizen, an Asian and a sixth person whose nationality was not immediately clear.
“According to the latest information, six people were kidnapped,” said an official from the Karkh area police station, which is in charge of the central Baghdad district.
The company’s lawyer confirmed that “among the six abducted employees were one American, an Asian and three Iraqi guards.”
A group led by Iraq’s most wanted man, Abu Mussab Al-Zarqawi, snatched US contractors Eugene Armstrong and Jack Hensley and their British colleague Kenneth Bigley from the same neighborhood in mid-September. All three were later beheaded.
“They are soft targets and unfortunately this sort of thing will get worse,” said an official at Iraq’s Foreign Ministry after yesterday’s abductions.
Out-gunned on the ground, militants in Iraq use Western hostages as weapons in a bid to crack the US-led military coalition and undermine the interim government.
