Ex-Guantanamo detainees plead for Iraq hostages' release
(AFP)
Updated: 2005-12-09 08:58

British former detainees at the American military base Guantanamo Bay appealed for the release of four Western peace campaigners held hostage and facing execution in Iraq.

Moazzam Begg, a Briton detained for nearly three years at the Guantanamo base in Cuba, said images of the hostages in orange jumpsuits reminded him of their time in detention.

The plea came after Britain issued a renewed appeal for the kidnappers to make contact.

Begg said in a statement on BBC television: "We came home to find that there were people who opposed their government in their brutal war waged against Afghanistan and Iraq and stood on the side of justice. And they were not Muslims."

Begg was one of the last four Britons to be repatriated from Guantanamo in January.

"It is our sincerest belief that Norman Kember, the 74-year-old Briton, and those with him are amongst those people, the many people, who opposed this war from the beginning and were only in Iraq to promote human rights for the oppressed."

"Just like Sheikh Abu Qatada, we also hope that our words may encourage you to show mercy to these men and let them free," Begg said.

In an exceptional gesture, the British Foreign Office authorised Qatada, an Islamist with reputed Al-Qaeda connections who is detained in Britain on security grounds, to record Wednesday an appeal for the hostages' release.

The kidnappers of Kember, Canadians James Loney, 41, and Harmeet Singh Sooden, 32, and US national Tom Fox, 54, extended by 48 hours to Saturday their deadline to kill them.

The four members of the Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT) organisation were abducted in Baghdad on November 26 by a group calling itself the Brigades of the Swords of Right.

It has threatened to kill them unless all detainees in US and Iraqi prisons are freed.

Begg told the BBC: "When I saw them in orange suits it brought back some terrible memories.

"I felt that perhaps we might have some effect by making an appeal for the release of those people held in Iraq.

"I think... that they feel they are getting some sort of retribution against the West by dressing people in orange and executing them."

Britain's Foreign Secretary Jack Straw earlier appealed to the abductors to make contact.

"As I have said before, if the kidnappers want to get in touch with us, we want to hear what they have to say. We have people in Iraq and the region and they are ready to hear from the kidnappers," Straw said.

Straw's appeal did not include an explicit offer to open negotiations.

"Norman Kember and his colleagues are campaigners for peace, dedicated to help others. We ask for their release," he said.

An extremist Sunni group, the Islamic Army in Iraq, claimed on the Internet earlier Thursday that it had executed an American hostage, contractor Ronald Schulz.

In its statement, the group claimed that Schulz -- "the American pig, the advisor to the ministry of housing" -- had been "killed" after the expiration of a 48-hour deadline set Tuesday.

The authenticity of its claim could not be independently verified, but the group ominously pledged: "We will show the images (of his execution) shortly."

A French engineer, Bernard Planche, 52, has apparently also been abducted in a separate attack, taken at gunpoint in Baghdad on Monday.

Around 40 foreigners remain missing or reported kidnapped in Iraq since a spate of kidnappings began in April 2004, a year after a US and British invasion toppled Saddam Hussein's dictatorship.

The revised date for the threatened execution of the four CPT activists was reported Thursday by the Arabic satellite news channel Al-Jazeera, which also broadcast images of two presumed hostages whose faces were not revealed.