Posted on 04/11/2004 3:51:37 PM PDT by MrBambaLaMamba
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Anguish ... Ayako Inoue, left, weeps with other relatives of the three Japanese hostages, below. Photo: Reuters/Eriko Sugito |
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One of the three Japanese being held hostage in Iraq will be executed at an unspecified time today - and the other two within 12 hours - unless Tokyo agrees to new demands, says an Iraqi go-between who claims to have seen them alive yesterday.
False hopes for the safety of the three were raised earlier when word spread from the Middle East to Japan that the Arab news network Al-Jazeera had reported they were to be released at mid-morning yesterday.
This was about the time of the original 72-hour deadline by which their abductors said they were to be burnt alive unless Japan withdrew its 550 troops from the American-led coalition occupying Iraq.
But Al-Jazeera denied there had been such a report and yesterday afternoon it aired an interview with Mazher Dulame, a small-time political figure in Falluja, the Sunni stronghold west of Baghdad which has been under US bombardment for almost a week. Mr Dulame read from a handwritten sheet provided by the abductors.
He claimed he had spoken with the leader of the group that had taken the three and that he had been able to deliver food and medicine to them and to a fourth hostage, believed to be an American contractor, Thomas Hamill. The group said the American, whose capture was filmed by Australian ABC-TV on the Baghdad-Amman Highway on Saturday, would be killed tomorrow.
The whereabouts and condition of the three Japanese hostages - Noriaki Imai, 18, and Nahoko Takato, 34, and 32-year-old photo-journalist Soichiro Koriyama - were not known.
The plan was to execute one of the male hostages first, then to kill the second male and the young woman at the same time, Mr Dumane said.
Apart from their original demand for a Japanese withdrawal, which Tokyo has rejected, the group also wanted Japanese diplomats now in Amman, including the Japanese Vice-Minister for Foreign Affairs, Ichiro Aisawa, to travel to Falluja to inspect damage and civilian deaths in the town, and that Japan apologise to Iraq and the people of Falluja for its part in the coalition.
Mr Dulame said they wanted the diplomats to "see the massacres perpetrated by US forces".
Asked how he had come by the information, he told an Al-Jazeera reporter on air that he had met the leader of the abductors and that he had spent time with the hostages, but he did not make clear which or any of them would need medicine.
A diplomat at the Japanese embassy in Amman questioned about the statement, told AFP: "We are still to confirm this report." He declined to comment on the status of Mr Dulame.
The Japanese Prime Minister, Junichiro Koizumi, has insisted that Japan would not withdraw the Japanese soldiers, deployed in the southern Iraqi city of Samawa for humanitarian work.
There was no news on the fate of other foreigners captured in Iraq. At least eight have been confirmed missing by their governments. But late on Saturday Iraqi insurgents said on Al-Arabiya TV that they were holding as many as 30 foreigners hostage.
Threatening to decapitate them unless US forces ended the siege of Falluja, a masked man brandishing a Kalashnikov said: "We are calling for the withdrawal of American and coalition forces. We have Japanese, Bulgarian, Israeli, American, Spanish and Korean hostages. Their numbers are 30."
Meanwhile, negotiators from the US-appointed Iraqi Governing Council returned from Falluja after talks that went late into Saturday night, saying they had won an agreement for a truce to start at 10am yesterday.
Video footage aired on Arabic television showed the bodies of two dead Westerners - apparently a pair of Americans seen by APTN cameramen on Friday being dragged out of a car on the Abu Ghraib highway.
Germany's foreign ministry said two security agents for its embassy in Baghdad who have been missing in Iraq for several days are most likely dead.
The two men were travelling from Amman, Jordan, to Baghdad on a routine trip on Wednesday and were ambushed near Falluja, the ministry said.
As fighting continued, a US helicopter was shot down west of Baghdad yesterday, killing its two crew members.
A pall of black smoke rose on the capital's western edge, where a military spokesman said the AH-64 Apache helicopter was downed by ground fire in the morning. Brigadier-General Mark Kimmitt confirmed that the two crew were killed and that a quick-reaction team was collecting the bodies.
The Falluja ceasefire sparked a flood of civilians desperate to get women and children away from the town, which has been in the grip of street-by-street fighting for almost a week.
As Americans moved another battalion into the Falluja siege, General Kimmitt said US forces were trying to honour the deal, but were still coming under fire.
US and Iraqi forces say they have captured 60 anti-coalition insurgents in Falluja, including five foreigners, from Egypt, Sudan and Syria.
The US said at the weekend that it had retaken much of Kut, in the south, which was overrun by the Mehdi Army when Ukrainian forces abandoned the town during last week's Shiite uprising.
Tension in Iraq remained high, mainly because of US undertakings that it will launch a "precise and determined" operation to capture the renegade imam Moqtada al-Sadr and wrest back control of the shrine cities of Kerbala, Najaf and Kufa.
It would be ironic if these anti-American jerks started this as a hoax and then found that the "freedom-fighters" they lionized decided to turn it from hoax to reality.
Turn about is fair play. The reporters (damn media) has been duping us since the war started,.............BIG Time.
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