WASHINGTON, 1 April 2005 — A US citizen was abducted earlier this week in Iraq along with three Romanian journalists, the US State Department said late Wednesday.
“There was one American with the three Romanians,” Steven Pike, a State Department spokesman, told AFP. “They were taken at the same time,” on Monday, Pike said.
Pike said that further details would not be released immediately, including the question of whether the US citizen was alive. “We assume that they are,” he said.
“We call for the immediate and safe release of all hostages in Iraq, including the American citizen and the three Romanian journalists who were taken on Monday,” Pike said.
According to Romanian media, the missing American is an Iraqi-American businessman, Mohammed Munaf, who financed the travel of the Romanians and acted as their guide in Baghdad. Arabic satellite channel Al-Jazeera showed the three Romanian journalists in the company of another individual taken hostage by an unidentified group in Iraq.
Two hooded men were seen pointing their weapons at the four visibly frightened hostages, who were seated on the ground against the backdrop of a floral carpet.
Marie-Jeanne Ion, 32, a reporter for Prima TV, her cameraman Sorin Miscoci, 30, and Eduard Ohanesian, 37, of the Romania Libera newspaper were reported missing by the Romanian Foreign Ministry earlier this week.
Yesterday, suicide car bombers mounted two attacks on Iraqi soldiers in northern Iraq, killing at least seven people.
In one attack, a suicide bomber blew up his car at an Iraqi army checkpoint in Suleiman Beik, 95 km south of the city of Kirkuk, killing three Iraqi soldiers and two civilians, a captain in the Iraqi military told Reuters.
In the town of Samarra, a stronghold of Sunni Arab insurgents 100 kilometers north of Baghdad, a car bomber detonated his vehicle beside an army patrol, killing at least two Iraqi soldiers, local officials said. Al-Qaeda’s wing in Iraq claimed responsibility in an Internet statement.
Also in northern Iraq, a US soldier was killed in action near the town of Hawija, the American military said.
On Wednesday, a US soldier was shot dead in Baghdad, another was killed by gunmen in Mosul and a Marine was killed in western Iraq when his vehicle hit a land mine.
In the town of Rabia on the Syrian border, thousands of armed Arab tribesmen were on the streets as tensions with Kurdish peshmerga militiamen deepened, officials said.
In Kerbala, 110 kilometers southwest of Baghdad, the streets were packed with Shiites who had arrived to observe Arbain.
Officials in Kerbala said more than 3 million pilgrims had come to the city over the past week.
Meanwhile, politicians have been unable to agree on the shape of Iraq’s next government, sparking a political crisis that has infuriated Iraqis who braved suicide bombers and insurgent threats to vote in the elections.
The Shiite alliance and the Kurdish coalition that came second in the polls have been haggling for weeks over Cabinet posts. There has also been an impasse over how to give key government posts to representatives of the Sunni Arab minority.
Shiites and Kurds say they want to involve Sunni Arabs in the government to prevent further sectarian strife.
One post that has been offered to Sunni Arabs is that of Parliament speaker. But parliament’s second-ever session on Tuesday failed to agree on who would take the post, and ended in acrimony with several lawmakers denouncing the deadlock.
Bulgaria, another US ally in Iraq, said yesterday it would propose to Parliament a cut in the Balkan state’s troop numbers in Iraq to 400 in June and a full withdrawal by the year’s end.
The withdrawal would be a blow to US forces which have already seen other countries pull out of Iraq.
