Jordan Times
Wednesday, December 21, 2005
Gunmen kidnap Jordanian
embassy driver in Baghdad
Amman considering staff move — PM
Agencies
Gunmen seized the driver of the Jordanian
ambassador to Iraq in Baghdad Tuesday, the latest abduction of a foreigner to
jolt the war-torn country, Jordanian and Iraqi sources said.
The kidnapping prompted Jordan to announce that it was considering relocating
its staff from the embassy, hit by a deadly car bomb two years ago.
The driver, a Jordanian living in Iraq for several years, was snatched in the
southern district of Saydiyah, Iraqi police said.
The Associated Press quoted Prime Minister Marouf Bakhit as saying that Mahmoud
Salman Saaidat was kidnapped by 15 masked men near his residence.
Bakhit told Parliament during a vote of confidence debate on his newly formed
Cabinet that there were “conflicting reports” on whether the driver was alone or
with his Iraqi wife when he was abducted from his private car.
A source told Agence France-Presse that Saaidat's abductors drove in two cars, a
Honda and a Nissan pick-up, which police were looking for.
Jordan has set up a “crisis cell” at the Foreign Ministry following the
abduction and is in contact with the Iraqi foreign ministry to secure Saaidat's
release, Bakhit added.
“Other parties have also opened contacts with different factions in Iraq to
guarantee the release of Saaidat.”
Jordan was “seriously considering to move the Jordanian embassy in Baghdad to
either Fallujah or to inside the Green Zone,” the prime minister said.
Baghdad's heavily protected Green Zone houses the Iraqi government and the US
and British embassies. Jordan briefly moved its staff to the Fallujah field
hospital after the August 2003 attack before relocating them to a house in the
upscale west Baghdad neighbourhood of Mansur.
Government Spokesperson Nasser Judeh told the Jordan News Agency, Petra, that
the Iraqi authorities should provide more protection to the embassy staff.
Petra said National Action Front and Shaab MPs condemned the kidnapping and
urged Iraqi government to help release Saaidat.
“The Jordanian government has started contacts to determine who is responsible
for this abduction,” an official said.
Jordan has named a new ambassador to Iraq, but Ahmad Lawzi has not yet taken up
his post in Baghdad where the embassy is currently being run by charge
d'affaires, Suleiman Arabiyat.
In August 2003, 14 people were killed and 40 wounded in a car bomb attack on the
embassy.
Iraq has been plagued by a resurgence of hostage-taking in recent weeks, with
fears growing for four Western peace activists and a missing French engineer,
who were all snatched in Baghdad.
Tuesday's kidnapping comes just a day after a Sunni Arab extremist group close
to Al Qaeda broadcast an Internet videotape showing the execution of a man it
said was a US contractor kidnapped in Iraq.
In the first such killing of a Westerner in over a year, the videotape showed a
blindfolded and handcuffed man on his knees being shot from behind by an assault
rifle and falling to his knees.
Iraq has been gripped by a catalogue of hostage-takings and grisly murders since
April 2004, with foreigners high-profile targets in a bid to exhort ransoms or
demand the withdrawal of coalition troops.
But on Sunday, Berlin announced that a German archaeologist and her driver, who
had been held hostage in Iraq for more than three weeks, had been released.
Susanne Osthoff, 43, had been doing aid work in Iraq for several years,
converted to Islam and speaks Arabic.
There has been no word of two Canadian hostages, James Loney and Harmeet Singh
Sooden, Briton Norman Kember, and American Tom Fox, after a second threatened
deadline to kill them ran out.
The Brigades of the Swords of Righteousness, believed to be holding the four
campaigners from the Christian Peacemaker Teams, demanded that Britain and the
United States free all prisoners held in Iraqi and coalition prisons.
Nor has there been any word from the captors of French engineer Bernard Planche,
who was snatched on December 5 in Baghdad, where he was working on a water
project.
Earlier this month, Egyptian Mohammed Ibrahim Hilali, 46, was found murdered
just north of Tikrit, less than 24 hours after gunmen kidnapped him.