BAGHDAD, 23 October 2004 — Kidnapped British aid worker Margaret Hassan pleaded yesterday for London to save her life by scrapping a plan to redeploy Britain’s troops in Iraq, as seven people died in US air and artillery strikes on Fallujah. “Please help me, please help me, these might be my last hours,” a sobbing Margaret said on a tape broadcast by Arabic news channel Al-Jazeera.
A weeping British-Iraqi hostage pleaded for her life in a video broadcast yesterday as British troops prepared to move nearer Baghdad ahead of an expected US-led offensive against rebels before January elections. Margaret urged Britons to tell Prime Minister Tony Blair to withdraw British troops from Iraq. “I don’t want to die like Bigley,” Irish-born Margaret said before collapsing in tears. She was referring to British hostage Kenneth Bigley, beheaded by his captors earlier this month.
Al-Jazeera did not name the group holding Margaret, who has lived in Iraq for 30 years and has Iraqi as well as British citizenship. She was seized in Baghdad on Tuesday. Margaret is the eighth foreign woman to have been kidnapped in Iraq since April.
The others, including two Italian aid workers held for three weeks in September, have been released. The video surfaced the day after Britain announced it would move 850 troops from their relatively safe base in south Iraq to a more hostile area near Baghdad to relieve US troops.
US Marines clashed with insurgents on the outskirts of Fallujah yesterday using heavy artillery, said a military spokesman. Determined to regain control of the no-go zone ahead of January polls, more than 1,000 joint forces have encircled the city for the past week. US and Iraqi forces raided several mosques in a crackdown on rebels during the holy fasting month of Ramadan. They detained a leading member of the Muslim Clerics Association in a campaign against opponents of the US presence in Iraq.
Sheikh Abdel-Sattar Abdel-Jabbar, his two sons and a neighbor were arrested at the Baghdad mosque compound where they live in the early hours, association officials said. “This arrest is part of a campaign not just against the Muslim Clerics Association but all opposition voices,” spokesman Muhammad Bashar Al-Faidhi said. Faidhi said at least seven clerics affiliated with the group, which has played a role in hostage negotiations and in Fallujah peace talks, had been detained in the last few days.
Iraqi forces backed by US troops raided a mosque during Friday prayers in the northern city of Mosul in what the military said was a hunt for suspected bomb-makers. “I did my best to calm the people, but we don’t want any Americans or any security organization to go into the mosque under the pretext of arresting people,” said Sheikh Rayan Tawfiq, who represents the Muslim Clerics Association in Mosul. “This is a holy place and a holy moment in a holy month,” the mosque preacher told Reuters.
US troops and Iraqi National Guard launched an operation to capture suspected insurgents hiding inside the mosque. “Multinational forces have secured the area around the Al-Nurain (Thul-Nurain) mosque, while Iraqi soldiers have gone into the mosque searching for terrorists believed to have taken sanctuary inside the mosque,” said a US military statement.
Preliminary court-martial proceedings were held yesterday for two US jail guards accused of physical and sexual abuse of Iraqi detainees in Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib Prison.
Facing a maximum 28-year-prison sentence, Spc. Charles Graner, who posed in a notorious photograph with naked Iraqi detainees stacked in a pyramid last autumn, sat clean shaven in court with his two attorneys, Guy Womack and Jay Heath.
The preliminary hearing saw the judge, Col. James Pohl, reject two requests from the defense and schedule the next court date for Dec. 3 and the actual trial itself for Jan. 7. Pohl turned down a request from the defense attorneys for an expert psychologist who participated in a 1971 study at Stanford University in California on prison abuse.
The lawyers of the second man hauled before court later yesterday — Sgt. Javal Davis — depicted their 26-year-old client as a pawn implementing orders, in his three-hour afternoon session. “Our position is that there was legally improper and unlawful command influence at the highest level,” attorney Paul Bergrin told AFP. But the court also threw out Davis’ request to force US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his intelligence deputy Stephen Cambone to sit down for questioning.
