An Islamist group on Tuesday released video footage showing 12 Nepalese workers dying in the worst mass killing of hostages since Sunni Islamist extremists embarked on a spree of kidnappings in April.
News of the killings overshadowed international efforts to secure the release of two French journalists held by a separate Iraqi group of militants, who are demanding that France overturns its ban on Muslim headscarves in schools.
A series of photographs and a video were posted on an Islamist website by Ansar al-Sunna on Tuesday showing one Nepalese hostage being beheaded and the others shot.
”We have carried out the sentence of God against 12 Nepalis who came from their country to fight the Muslims and to serve the Jews and the Christians … believing in Buddha as their God,” said the statement by the military committee of the Army of Ansar al-Sunna.
If all 12 workers are confirmed dead, the killing represents the largest number of foreign hostages to die at one time at the hands of rebels in Iraq, who have taken more than 100 hostages over the past few months.
The Nepalis were kidnapped when they entered Iraq from Jordan to work as cooks and cleaners for a Jordanian firm.
The recording showed two masked men holding down a hostage. One of the men used a knife to behead the hostage and then held his head aloft. The video then showed a group of hostages lying face down and being shot by a man using an automatic rifle.
Ansar al-Sunna, one of several militant groups to emerge following the fall of Saddam Hussein, said it kidnapped the Nepalis because they were cooperating with US troops.
In France, there was growing anxiety for the safety of Christian Chesnot of Radio France International and Georges Malbrunot of Le Figaro, and their Syrian driver, as the extended deadline for the French government to respond to their captors’ demands expired.
France’s most senior politicians spent their third day running in crisis meetings. French envoys collected new declarations of support from figures in the Arab world who might possibly have some influence over the militants responsible for the kidnapping, the Islamic Army of Iraq.
Islamic religious leaders joined political leaders in Egypt, Qatar, Jordan and from the Palestinian Authority to call for the journalists’ release.
Late on Monday night, soon after the first deadline expired, the two men were shown for the second time on the Arab television station, al-Jazeera, warning that their lives would be at risk if the French government refused to overturn legislation which bans pupils from displays of religious affiliation at school.
Both men appealed to the French nation to protest against the law.
However, the 100 or so people who turned out for a show of solidarity with the journalists at Paris’s central mosque on Tuesday were not calling for repeal of the law, but simply for the men’s release. – Guardian Unlimited Â