BAGHDAD, 12 March 2006 — American hostage Tom Fox has been killed and his body, showing signs of torture, left at a garbage dump in Baghdad.
One of the policemen who found the body said the 54-year-old peace activist, wearing a gray tracksuit, appeared to have been beaten with electric cables before his death. He had a single gunshot wound to the head and his hands were tied behind him.
Fox, who had been in Iraq to campaign against the US occupation and to work for the release of Iraqis held by US forces, was taken hostage with three colleagues in November by a group calling itself the “Swords of Truth.”
The group had threatened to kill the four, members of the Chicago-based Christian Peacemaker Teams, unless US forces and the Iraqi authorities freed all prisoners in their custody. US Embassy spokeswoman Elizabeth Colton said Fox’s body was on its way back to the United States. She had no comment on the nature of his death.
A member of the police patrol which found Fox’s body told Reuters it had been left beside a railway line on waste ground used as a garbage dump in Baghdad’s western Mansour district.
The policeman, who declined to be identified, said local people had covered the body with pieces of cardboard after reporting the discovery to police. “When we pulled back the cardboard we immediately saw it was a foreigner and called headquarters,” he said.
Fox, a father of two, had expressed concern in an article written the day before his abduction about the dehumanization of Iraqis amid a raging insurgency and US responses that he said often claimed the lives of innocents.
US State Department spokesman Noel Clay said the FBI had formally identified Fox’s body. More forensic examinations would be conducted in the United States.
Fears about Fox’s fate were raised earlier this week when Arabic television station Al Jazeera aired a video dated Feb. 28 showing only fellow activists Norman Kember, a Briton, and Canadians James Loney and Harmeet Sooden.
There was no word yesterday on the fate of the three, who looked well in the video and did not appear distressed.
Gunmen, meanwhile, assassinated a senior editor for Iraqi state television along with his driver yesterday as they headed to work in Baghdad, police and the channel said.
Iraqiya television and police sources said Amjad Hameed, a father of three, had just left his house in central Baghdad when a car blocked his way and gunmen shot him in the head. He was the second Iraqi journalist to be killed in a week.
Hameed’s assassination drew wide condemnation and renewed calls for journalists to be allowed to carry firearms to protect themselves.
Mu’ayad Al-Lami of the Iraqi Journalists Syndicate urged all sides to recognize the neutrality of journalists in Iraq.
