/ 20 October 2004

British aid worker held in Iraq

A British woman who has devoted most of her life to caring for the people of Iraq became the latest victim of Baghdad’s ruthless kidnap gangs on Tuesday.

Video footage of Margaret Hassan, looking tired and drawn with her hands tied behind her back, was shown on an Arabic television channel. The Iraqi director of the charity Care International (52) was kidnapped at around 7.30am on her way to work in the Khadra district of western Baghdad.

Her capture comes two weeks after the murder of Ken Bigley, the Liverpool engineer who was kidnapped in Baghdad and beheaded by Tawhid and Jihad, the militants led by the Jordanian extremist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

Wearing a cream shirt, Hassan was shown on the video apparently talking, although no sound could be heard. The tape also showed Hassan’s identity papers and a credit card. Unlike most of the previous videos of kidnappings in Iraq, no militants or banners appeared.

It was not clear on Tuesday night who had abducted Hassan or why. Her husband told the television station al-Jazeera from Baghdad that his wife had been driving to work when she was kidnapped.

”When my wife was approaching her office, two cars surrounded her vehicle. The kidnappers attacked the driver and took control of her car, driving off with her to an unknown destination,” Tahseen Ali Hassan said.

”We haven’t heard anything about the group and no one has contacted us,” he said.

The station said the footage of Hassan was accompanied by a claim of responsibility from an unnamed Iraqi group. It was received ”through the usual channels”, a spokesperson said.

Born in Dublin but married to an Iraqi and holding both Iraqi and British passports, Hassan, who has lived in the country for more than 25 years, was a vociferous opponent of the sanctions that starved the Iraqi people of food, water and medical supplies after the war in 1991 and last year’s invasion. Friends say she speaks Arabic with an Iraqi accent and considers herself Iraqi.

Care is one of the few charities still operating in Iraq after the abduction last month of two Italian aid workers. Both women were later freed after a ransom was paid.

Tony Blair said the government would do everything it could to secure Hassan’s release. ”This is someone who has lived in Iraq for 30 years, someone who is immensely respected, someone who is doing her level best to help the country,” he said.

”It shows you the type of people we are up against, that they are prepared to kidnap somebody like this.”

A spokesperson for Care said in a statement: ”As of now we are unaware of the motive for the abduction. As far as we know, Margaret is unharmed. Needless to say, we are doing whatever we can to secure her release.” Felicity Arbuthnot, an Irish freelance journalist who has known Hassan for 15 years, said she was much-loved in Iraq: ”She could go anywhere and didn’t need a minder, even if she was going to a place that made Sadr city look like Knightsbridge.”

Asked how her friend would deal with her captors, Arbuthnot said: ”She’ll be talking to them in Arabic, keeping her voice calm and low and she will be talking and communicating. She’s very used to people who feel very alienated, very hostile and very distant.”

She said she hoped the prime minister would step back and allow the Irish government to lead the efforts to secure Hassan’s release.

The British Foreign Office said the British embassy in Baghdad was in touch with Hassan’s next of kin.

The Irish foreign minister, Dermot Ahern, said his thoughts were with the Hassans: ”I stand ready to contribute in any way we can to help secure her release.”

Once again the kidnapping highlights the dangers for foreigners in Iraq. More than 140 have been kidnapped since April and dozens have been killed — none of them, however, foreign women.

Hassan has worked tirelessly to improve the lives of ordinary Iraqis suffering from what she believed was a ”man-made disaster” caused by a decade of sanctions and the war that finally toppled Saddam Hussein.

In the build-up to the war last year, she warned MPs of the humanitarian catastrophe another conflict would bring. In January 2003, she travelled to New York and spent a week briefing the members of the United Nations security council and UN agencies on the dire consequences of military action.

She heads an office of 60 Iraqi charity workers, and refused to leave her team during the war. They continued to work to give hospitals essential medical supplies, such as insulin, disinfectant and blood-testing kits, while also restoring sewage systems and access to clean water.

Hassan embraced the ethos of Care, which prides itself on its policy of employing local staff. Ninety percent of its 10 000 employees worldwide work in their home countries.

”We want to stress that she sees herself as an Iraqi,” a spokesperson for Care said. ”Iraq is her home. She has been living there for many years and would never consider coming back to Britain.”

Elsewhere in Iraq a mortar attack killed at least four Iraqi national guard soldiers and wounded 80 at a base north of Baghdad. An American contractor also died when mortar shells crashed into a US base in the Iraqi capital. And three car bombs exploded in the northern city of Mosul, killing two Iraqi civilians and wounding three. – Guardian Unlimited Â