TEHRAN/BAGHDAD, 12 August 2004 — At least three reporters working for Iran’s official IRNA news agency, reported kidnapped by state television, have been arrested by Baghdad police, one of the agency’s senior editors said yesterday.
Iranian journalists have run into trouble with the authorities in Iraq before. Iraq’s defense minister has recently upped anti-Iranian rhetoric, accusing Tehran of sending spies and arms across the border to foment unrest.
“Local police have arrested three of our colleagues in Iraq,” Hassan Lavasani, the head of foreign news at IRNA, said. He said the bureau chief and two other Iranian reporters had been seized.
But Iran’s embassy in Baghdad said two of the men were Iraqi local staff. IRNA’s own reports said three local staff had been arrested by the police, along with the bureau chief. IRNA is affiliated to Iran’s reformist government.
The ISNA student news agency named the bureau chief as Mostafa Darban. It named three other detainees as Mohammad Khafaji, Mohsen Madani and “Abu Ali”. Their nationalities were not immediately clear.
IRNA reports added the agency lost contact with its Baghdad bureau on Monday afternoon. A former IRNA Baghdad bureau chief, speaking to state television, said a group of armed men had stormed the IRNA bureau in Baghdad.
“Neighbors said they were police and we have sent an inquiry through the embassy to clarify whether they were and where they have been taken to,” he said.
Journalists from Iran’s state television said they had made unsuccessful inquiries to the Iraqi police on the whereabouts of the men.
Meanwhile, a Jordanian kidnapped in Iraq has been released, Arab television Al Arabiya reported yesterday. The satellite channel did not give his name or any further details.
Militant groups in Iraq have kidnapped dozens of foreign hostages to pressure US allies and foreign firms to withdraw from Iraq. Some hostages have been killed and others released unharmed.
Two Jordanian drivers were among five Middle Eastern truck drivers held hostage in Iraq freed earlier this week. The two had been held for two weeks by militants demanding their company stop working with the US military in Iraq.
Armed Iraqis freed four other Jordanian hostages in a raid on their captors’ hide-out last week. The captors said they were holding the men to force the transport company to stop cooperating with US forces. But the freed hostages later said their kidnappers had wanted money.
In an another development, a website used by militants carried a video yesterday purporting to show militants beheading a “CIA agent” in Iraq.
The four-minute long footage showed a Western-looking man sitting on a chair surrounded by armed masked men, who beheaded the captive. A sign placed around the man’s neck identified him as a “CIA agent”. The video could not be immediately authenticated.
In Sofia, the Bulgarian Foreign Ministry said yesterday that the body of a second Bulgarian hostage, kidnapped in Iraq last month, had been identified as that of Ivailo Kepov, BTA news agency reported. Kepov, a 32-year-old truck driver, was identified in a DNA test carried out by US experts in the US state of Delaware. He was killed by a group linked to the Al-Qaeda network.
Kepov and another truck driver, Georgy Lazov, 30, were taken hostage on July 8 near the northern Iraqi city of Mosul. Lazov was also beheaded and his body identified on July 22.
