The fate of two French journalists kidnapped in Iraq remained unclear on Wednesday night as a deadline passed with no word on their fate, while an Iraqi militant group said it had freed seven truck drivers seized more than a month ago.
The drivers — from India, Kenya and Egypt — were on their way back to Kuwait on Wednesday after the firm that employs them announced it had agreed to the kidnappers’ demands to pull out of Iraq.
The Kuwait and Gulf Link Transport Company (KGL) also said it had paid $500 000 to the abductors, who were part of a group calling itself al-Rayat al-Sud or the Black Banners Division of the Islamic Secret Army.
”They were not trying to make a political statement, they were purely extortionists,” KGL’s chief executive, Said Dashti, said in Kuwait as the seven arrived there.
”We didn’t sleep from happiness. Thank God, everyone helped us,” one of the freed hostages, Egyptian Mohamed Ali Sanad told al-Arabiya TV.
Television footage showed a kidnapper, his face covered by a red-checked kaffiyeh , shaking hands with each captive and then handing them a copy of the Qur’an.
An eighth, previously unknown, hostage, a Turkish truck driver, Tassin Abdul Rahim, was also pictured being released by kidnappers.
Violence continued to shake Iraq on Wednesday night, this time in Falluja, where United States forces launched an air strike on a target they described as a safe house where militants had been spotted executing a captive. The victim’s identity was not known. Hospital officials and witnesses said 17 people were killed in the US attack, including three children.
The abductors of the French journalists had threatened to execute both men if the French government did not repeal a law banning the wearing of headscarves in French schools, which comes into effect today.
On Wednesday night the deadline passed with no word on whether the pair — Georges Malbrunot and Christian Chesnot, who were seized in Iraq nearly two weeks ago — were still alive.
President Jacques Chirac reiterated on Wednesday that the French authorities ”would continue to do their utmost, in these difficult hours and days”, to free the two journalists. The foreign minister, Michel Barnier, was in Doha yesterday to meet editors at al-Jazeera, which has broadcast video footage of the pair.
France’s normally fractured Muslim community has united to express its outrage at the hostage-taking.
An official delegation from the French National Muslim Council has been despatched to Baghdad.
Friends and relatives of the two men said they were sick with worry. ”I can’t even watch the television,” Malbrunot’s mother, Andrée, told Le Parisien. ”I knew he shouldn’t have gone this time.”
Chesnot, a reporter for Radio France International, and Malbrunot, who writes for Le Figaro, disappeared on August 20 while on their way to Najaf.
They appear to be in the hands of a hardline Sunni Islamist group and were almost certainly seized near Mahmudiya, a Sunni enclave about 50km south of Baghdad.
Wednesday’s release of the seven truck drivers came a day after another Iraqi militant group announced it had shot dead and decapitated 12 Nepalis, the worst mass killing of hostages in Iraq.
Dozens of foreign nationals have been kidnapped since April, when Iraq’s resistance embarked on a new tactic designed to scare away foreign firms and investors.
Most foreigners have now left. The only westerners still in Iraq and travelling around without armed escorts are journalists.
The Najaf-Baghdad road has become treacherous and on Wednesday gunmen opened fire on a convoy carrying the former Iraqi governing council member Ahmad Chalabi, killing two of his guards.
Chalabi was the subject of counterfeiting allegations last month, but said on Wednesday that the charges against him had been dropped. An Iraqi judge said he would issue a final decision as soon as today on whether to proceed with the case. – Guardian Unlimited Â