BAGHDAD, 30 September 2004 — A weeping British hostage was shown pleading for help between the bars of a makeshift cage in a video that surfaced yesterday, a sobering reminder of the grim reality for at least 18 foreign captives still held by Iraqi militants.
There is wide speculation that ransoms were paid for the freedom of a dozen other hostages, including two Italian aid workers.
The footage, which first aired on TV channel Al-Jazeera and was later posted on the Internet, showed Kenneth Bigley begging British Prime Minister Tony Blair to meet his captors’ demands.
“Tony Blair, I am begging you for my life,” Bigley said between sobs. “Have some compassion. Only you can help me now.”
He accused Blair of lying about efforts to secure his release, saying no negotiations were taking place.
“My life is cheap. He doesn’t care about me. I am just one person,” Bigley said. “I want to go home. Please, Mr. Blair don’t leave me here.”
It was the second tape in a week to surface showing Bigley appealing for help. Iraq’s most feared terror group, Tawhid and Jihad, has beheaded two American hostages seized with Bigley and warned that he will be the next to die unless Iraqi women prisoners are freed.
Gruesome videotapes of the killings were posted on the Internet, and the men’s decapitated bodies were found in Baghdad — not far from the upscale neighborhood where they were seized from their house in a daring Sept. 16 raid.
Iraqi security forces backed by US troops arrested a suspected terrorist operating on Baghdad’s bloodied Haifa Street, cornering the panicked man in a closet as he tried to conceal his face with his wife’s underwear, an Iraqi National Guard commander said.
Kadhim Al-Dafan is believed to be a key neighborhood leader, responsible for car bombs and other attacks in the area, an insurgent enclave, said Col. Mohammed Abdullah. Five other suspected insurgents were also taken into custody as US and Iraqi forces clashed with rebels on the street.
The hostage crisis has added to the problems facing Iraq’s US-backed government as it tries to deal with a mounting insurgency and prepares for January’s elections.
The US military said it had launched an overnight air strike on an “insurgent rocket team” in Baghdad’s slum of Sadr City, an area largely under guerrilla control, and had destroyed an insurgent vehicle.
In Mosul, 390 km north of Baghdad, a car bomb exploded near the university as a US patrol drove past, wounding six American soldiers, the US military said.
In the latest slaying of a religious figure, gunmen in the city of Baqubah killed a member of the pro-government Shiite party Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq.
In the latest tape, Bigley sat hunched on the floor of a cage, his hands and legs in chains. He was dressed in an orange jumpsuit, similar to the ones worn by Americans Eugene Armstrong and Jack Hensley when they were slain. Jordanian terror mastermind Abu Mussab Al-Zarqawi beheaded Armstrong himself.
There have been conflicting, unsubstantiated reports of Bigley’s fate. A spokesman for the British Foreign Office said the tape’s release was “positive to the extent that it does appear to prove, as we’d hoped, that Ken is alive.” “It’s undated, so that’s not 100 percent,” the spokesman added on customary condition of anonymity.
Blair’s office at No. 10 Downing Street declined to comment on the tape. “It goes without saying that we are in contact with the family,” a spokeswoman said.
Earlier, Blair said his government was trying to contact Bigley’s kidnappers.
“The difficulty is that ...these are outside people, they are not Iraqis,” Blair told Britain’s ITV television. “We are trying to make contact with them and we are doing everything we possibly can.”
Bigley’s brother, Paul, told the British Broadcasting Corp. that the images of his brother chained and caged were “absolutely appalling, there’s no other word for it, heart wrenching.” But he said he was pleased to see his brother still alive.
“That’s the good news I see through the smoke,” he said. “This is a last-ditch attempt, something has to be done and something has to be done very quickly.”
More than 140 foreigners have been kidnapped in Iraq and at least 26 have been killed. Some, like Bigley, were seized by insurgents as leverage in their campaign against the United States and its allies. But others were taken by criminals seeking ransom.
“This kind of thing creates a broader contagion for people suffering for other reasons under the occupation,” said Jonathan Stevenson, senior fellow for counterterrorism with the International Institute for Strategic Studies in Washington. “They get the idea that they can earn some extra cash by kidnapping people.”
— Additional input from agencies
