BAGHDAD, 6 December 2005 — A French engineer working in Iraq was kidnapped in a wealthy Baghdad neighborhood yesterday, bringing to six the number of Westerners abducted over the past week in a resurgence of hostage-taking.
The latest abduction follows a surge of international appeals for hostages to be freed unharmed amid a fresh spike in violence in the run-up to a crunch general election on Dec. 15. The French Foreign Ministry named the man as Bernard Planche and said he was working in Iraq for an organization called AACCESS, “in the social and economic sector,” without elaborating.
According to Iraqi police, four armed militants, including a woman, broke into his house in the Mansour neighborhood around 9:20 am (0620 GMT) and dragged him out. When Planche refused to enter the car, he was pistol whipped. A nearby policeman opened fire. The gunmen returned fire and fled with their hostage. The policeman said blood was visible on the doorstep.
According to the online minutes of a water and sanitation coordination meeting held in March at UNICEF offices in Amman, which Planche attended, his company works on rehabilitation projects funded by the US army. The grand mufti of the Palestinian territories, where insecurity is also a major concern, yesterday became the latest foreign figure to appeal for the release of four Western Christian peace campaigners kidnapped in Iraq.
Ekrema Sabri said that the four had all previously campaigned as supporters of the Palestinian cause in the occupied West Bank. “It is our duty to support them and to issue a vigorous appeal to the kidnappers to free them so that they can go back to their families and resume their humanitarian work,” he said.
Muslim scholars and activists from around the world, including leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah groups, appealed for the release of four Western peace activists. “Such peace activists should have been welcomed into Iraq and treated as honorable guests instead of being kidnapped and used as bargaining chips,” said a statement issued by the Muslim Association of Britain and signed by 25 Muslim figures.
Khaled Mishaal, head of the political bureau of the Palestinian Hamas movement, and two officials of the Lebanese Hezbollah group were among the signatories, along with clerics and scholars from Algeria to Malaysia. “While fully supporting the right of the Iraqi people to resist occupation with all legitimate means, we denounce as illegitimate any act of aggression against innocent civilians,” the statement said.
The two Canadians, one American and one Briton are linked to the US and Canada-based Christian Peacemaker Teams which opposes the continued presence of US-led foreign troops in Iraq. Their families have taped emotional video messages to their captors begging for their freedom. Concern was also rising for a 43-year-old German woman, Susanne Osthoff, three days after the expiry of a kidnappers’ reported demand for Berlin to stop training local police or she would be killed.
As tension mounts 10 days before an election for a permanent government, the last step in a long US-led political transition following the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, an Iraqi electoral official was killed. Two of his colleagues were also wounded in a drive-by shooting in the town of Baquba, north of Baghdad, police and electoral officials said.
Amid concerns that premature foreign troop pullouts could be disastrous, Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari called on Japan to extend its controversial military deployment to Iraq, otherwise set to expire next week.
In another development, former Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Hamza Al-Zubaidi, who was one of Saddam Hussein’s most senior deputies in the early 1990s, died in US detention last week, the US military said yesterday.
Zubaidi, on the US military’s list of the 55 most-wanted Iraqis during the war, died at a US military hospital on Dec. 2, said Lt. Col. Guy Rudisill, spokesman for detainee operations in Iraq. The US military issued a statement about the death of an individual on Saturday, but did not refer to Zubaidi by name.
