ISTANBUL, 18 February 2005 — A Turkish businessman who was kidnapped in Iraq in December and released this week, has admitted that he paid a ransom of half a million dollars (385,000 euros) to his abductors.
The kidnappers “told me they wanted a sum that would be useful to them but wouldn’t break me. I paid $500,000,” Kahraman Sadikoglu told reporters Wednesday evening in Istanbul, according to the Anatolia news agency.
The ransom was paid to one of the kidnappers in Jordan, he said, adding that he had been well treated while in captivity.
According to Sadikoglu, who was set free on Monday, his kidnappers were former officers of deposed Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.
The Turkish shipowner and three of his companions were kidnapped in mid-December in southern Iraq near Umm Qasr, a port city on the border with Kuwait.
Sadikoglu’s companions — two Turks and one Iraqi — were freed in January. Sadikoglu owns a freight company based in Istanbul which does business in the Iraqi cities of Basra and Umm Qasr. The company won contracts to salvage ships that sank in the Gulf in the war between Iraq and Iran during the 1980s. Some 80 Turks, most of them truck drivers, have been killed in Iraq in recent months.
