BAGHDAD, 23 June 2006 — The kidnappers of more than 100 Iraqi government employees freed all their Sunni hostages yesterday, highlighting once again the sectarian conflict that has engulfed Iraq.
The Industry Ministry workers were seized by gunmen Wednesday after their shift ended at a factory north of Baghdad.
“Women hostages and those who were Sunnis were set free, and we believe that now about 40 to 50 employees are still held captive,” an Interior Ministry official said.
Two of the hostages were killed as they “tried to escape,” Industry Minister Fawzi Hariri said on state television.
The workers at the Hateen and Nasr factories in Taji, 30 km north of the capital, were seized by at least 50 gunmen and spirited away on the same buses they had boarded to take them home.
Those still held captive are believed to be Shiites from Baghdad’s Sadr City and the neighborhoods of Shuala and Hurriyah.
The kidnappers apparently separated the two groups by checking the names on individual identity cards, the official said.
The brazen daylight abduction was a reminder of the sectarian conflict that has left thousands dead in Iraq since a Shiite shrine in Samarra was dynamited in February.
It also came the same day as Khamis Al-Obeidi, one of Saddam Hussein’s lawyers, was kidnapped and shot dead in Baghdad. In reaction, the former president and some of his regime officials have launched a hunger strike.
Obeidi’s widow said the family was too afraid to go to the morgue to claim her husband’s body. “Neither I, nor my in-laws, who are in Ramadi, dare to go to the mortuary to collect Khamis’ body because we are afraid of being killed,” she said, adding that she and her children had been taken to heavily guarded Green Zone for their protection.
