Free Republic

AMMAN/TOKYO - An audio message purportedly from a Japanese journalist being held by Islamic State militants said a Jordanian air force pilot also captured by the group would be killed unless an Iraqi female prisoner in Jordan was released by sunset on Thursday. The message appeared to postpone a previous deadline set on Tuesday in which the journalist, Kenji Goto, said he would be killed within 24 hours if the Iraqi was not freed. The latest audio recording, which could not be verified by Reuters, was posted on YouTube early on Thursday. Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga told a...

Jordan has agreed to demands from ISIS that it release a female jihadist held since 2006, in a move that could free a Jordanian pilot captured in Syria last month and possibly a Japanese journalist who pleaded for his life in a video released by the terror group on Tuesday. Jordanian government spokesman Mohammed al-Momani said in a statement the nation was prepared to free Sajida al-Rishawi, who was convicted of taking part in a deadly hotel bombing, if the Jordanian pilot, Lt. Muath al-Kaseasbeh, is released unharmed. His comments were carried by Jordan's official Petra news agency. Although he...

A court on Thursday sentenced an Iraqi woman and six other people to death for their roles in the triple hotel bombings that killed 60 people in Jordan's capital last year. The 35-year-old woman, Sajida al-Rishawi, is the only defendant in custody. She confessed on Jordanian television shortly after the blasts that she intended to carry out a suicide attack on one of the Western hotels. Six others, including another Iraqi woman, were sentenced in absentia and remain at large. They are believed to be hiding in Iraq. The late al-Qaida in Iraq leader, Jordanian-born Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, had claimed...

When a bewildered Iraqi woman named Sajida al-Rishawi confessed on Jordanian state television last week that she had been part of the team that tried to blow up the Radisson Hotel in Amman, she showed that Iraq has become a base from which al Qaeda launches attacks against its enemies and that suicide terrorism may be the one area in Mid-East culture where fundamentalist Muslim women are finally gaining equality with men. Wearing her defused bomb belt, which failed to detonate when the three other members of her team blew themselves up along with members of a Jordanian wedding party,...