BAGHDAD, 27 July 2004 — Iraqi insurgents yesterday freed an Egyptain diplomat, but kidnapped more foreign workers as a suicide bomber detonated a car filled with explosives near the gates of a US base in Mosul, killing three people. In the capital a top Interior Ministry official was assassinated.
“I am free and already at the Egyptian interests section in Baghdad,” Mohamed Mamdouh Qutb, the thrid ranking diplomat at the Egyptian mission, was quoted by Agence France Presse as saying.
Al-Jazeera TV quoted one of his kidnappers as saying his group decided to free Qutb “because of the religious faith and the moral qualities he possesses.”
Earlier in the day, two Jordanian drivers employed by a company supplying the US army were kidnapped. A colleague at Daoud and Partners named the victims as Ahmed Salameh Hassan and Fayez Saad Al-Adwan. The firm has been transporting food to US troops in Iraq since the March 2003 invasion and is headed by an American. The kidnappers demanded that the firm stop operating in Iraq.
The so-called Islamic Army also threatened to kill two Pakistanis and an Iraqi hostage in a statement broadcast on Al-Jazeera. Video footage was shown of the Pakistanis’ photo-identity cards, which named them as Azad Hussein Khan and Sajjad Naeem, employed by a Kuwaiti company. Their captors said the Pakistanis would be killed because their country was discussing sending troops to Iraq.
But there was new hope for three Indians, three Kenyans and an Egyptian snatched last Wednesday, after their kidnappers stayed a threat to start killing them.
Video footage shown by Al-Arabiya of the seven confirmed the authenticity of a statement received by wire services earlier in the name of the “Holders of the Black Banners”.
The statement said the group had agreed to stave off its grisly threat to start executing its hostages from 1600 GMT Monday to allow negotiations for their release to take place.
It was not clear what they now considered to be the deadline, which has already been extended once. The captives’ firm, the Kuwait and Gulf Link Transport Company, said it had received assurances the hostages would be freed.
Kenya said it has sent two diplomats to Kuwait to negotiate the Kenyans’ release, while the 11th-hour reprieve brought cheers from the families of the kidnapped Indians.
The crises were the latest in a wave of abductions of foreigners designed to pressure countries to withdraw their troops from Iraq and to hamper efforts to rebuild the country.
George Sada, spokesman for Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, said the abductions were affecting reconstruction efforts because some countries were preventing their citizens — laborers and experts alike — from coming.
The kidnappings “might delay the process but they are not going to stop it,” he said.
Adel Abou Hawili, shipping manager for Kuwait’s Al-Roomi Shipping Agency, said the wave of kidnappings have forced transport costs up “50 to 65 percent” and made it harder to find drivers to work in Iraq.
The attack in Mosul killed an Iraqi guard, a woman and a child, the US military said. Three American soldiers were among half a dozen people injured. Mosul has been the scene of numerous terrorist attacks, including two car bombings in January and June that each killed nine people.
Attackers killed a senior Interior Ministry official and two of his bodyguards in a drive-by shooting at the official’s Baghdad home, according to the Interior Ministry. Col. Musab Al-Awadi, the ministry’s deputy chief of tribal affairs, and his guards had just left the house in Al-Baya neighborhood when the gunmen drove up and shot them, according to Sabah Kadhim, an Interior Ministry spokesman.
Al-Awadi, who had been forced to retire from the police force in 1979 because of his connection to the opposition Shiite Dawa party, was appointed to his post after the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime last year, said Col. Adnan Abdel Rahman, the Interior Ministry spokesman.
Al-Awadi’s brother Rassim is a senior member of Allawi’s Iraqi National Accord, and the family believes that is why he was targeted, said his son, Dureid Al-Awadi.
In Basra, insurgents killed two Iraqi women working as cleaners with British forces in southern Iraq and seriously injured two others, police and hospital officials said.
Lt. Col. Ali Kadhem of Basra police said attackers drove alongside the women’s car as they were driving to work at Basra airport and sprayed gunfire at them. He said that two women were killed and two injured.
All four worked as cleaners at the airport, which is used as a base by British forces.
— Additional input from agencies
