Kidnappers seize charity chief in Baghdad
(Agencies)
Updated: 2004-10-19 21:15

Kidnappers seized a woman who heads a British charity in Baghdad Tuesday, just over two weeks after captors beheaded British hostage Kenneth Bigley.

Margaret Hassan

A spokeswoman for Care International in London said Margaret Hassan was an Iraqi national who had lived in Iraq for about 30 years and had worked for the charity there since the early 1990s.

"We do want to stress that she is an Iraqi national, not a Briton. She has been living there for many years," she said.

Care is one of the few international aid agencies to have maintained a continuous presence in Iraq. Most others pulled their remaining foreign staff out of the country after two Italian aid workers were kidnapped for three weeks in September.

Kidnappers have taken scores of foreign hostages since April and killed at least 30 of them. They have also targeted Iraqis viewed as collaborating with U.S.-led forces or the interim government.

A militant group led by Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, America's top enemy in Iraq, claimed responsibility for Bigley's beheading and that of two Americans seized with him last month.

U.S. planes struck overnight at targets which the military said were being used by Zarqawi's network in the rebel-held city of Falluja.

Hostage-taking, suicide bombings and sabotage have kept Iraq in bloody chaos since last year's U.S.-led invasion.

Four Iraqi National Guards were killed and up to 80 wounded in a mortar attack on their headquarters north of Baghdad, the U.S. military and Iraqi Defense Ministry said. A Defense Ministry statement said the attack occurred in the morning at Tarmiya, about 16 miles north of Baghdad.

FALLUJA POLICE CHIEF FREED

U.S. forces released the police chief of Falluja and two of his colleagues who were detained Friday with the city's chief negotiator, Khaled al-Jumaili. He was released early Monday.

"I have been meeting the Americans three times a week and I cooperate with them. So my arrest came as a surprise," the police chief, Sabar al-Janabi, told Reuters after his release.

The U.S. military gave no reason for the arrests and never confirmed it was holding the four men. Police in Falluja do not answer to the interim government in Baghdad.

The government has threatened to attack Falluja unless Zarqawi's men are handed over, as part of its drive to pacify all of Iraq before parliamentary elections due in January.

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said a crackdown on insurgents in hotspots like Falluja had to be calibrated to avoid losing a battle for the hearts and minds of Iraqis.

"In these kind of situations you have two wars going on," he told reporters in London. "You have the war for minds and hearts of the people as well as efforts to try and bring down the violence."

Secretary of State Colin Powell said his country was doing all it could to enable Iraqis to conduct elections.

"It's still possible to have the kind of election we want to have by the end of January. The key is security and building up Iraqi forces to make them competent, fully equipped and able to do the job," he told USA Today newspaper in an interview.

Powell mocked a suggestion by Democratic presidential challenger John Kerry that an international summit would draw more foreign troops to the U.S.-led multinational force in Iraq.

"The suggestion being that if only there was an international conference, the French and Germans would send troops. Really?" he said.

The United States has asked staunch ally Britain to send troops now based in southern Iraq to more volatile areas closer to Baghdad to free up U.S. units to fight insurgents.

British Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon said a British team would be in the field Tuesday to assess practicalities, but said no decision had been taken on a deployment that could revive anger in Britain over Prime Minister Tony Blair's Iraq policies.

Saboteurs blew up a section of Iraq's northern oil export pipeline and set it on fire, but exports to Turkey kept flowing, oil officials said.

Supply disruptions in Iraq and elsewhere, along with fears over tightly stretched supplies, as well as strong demand, have helped boost oil prices more than 60 percent this year.

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