/ 23 October 2004

‘Help me. This might be my last hours’

Margaret Hassan, the aid worker being held hostage in Iraq, on Friday made an emotional appeal for British forces to withdraw from Iraq to save her from the same fate as murdered contractor Ken Bigley.

”Please help me, please help me,” said Hassan in a video shown on the Arabic television station al-Jazeera. ”This might be my last hours. Please help me, please, the British people, ask Mr Blair to take the troops out of Iraq, and not to bring them here to Baghdad,” she sobbed.

”That’s why people like Mr Bigley and myself are being caught. And maybe we will die like Mr Bigley. Please, please, I beg of you.”

The broadcast came less than 24 hours after the government confirmed that an 850-strong battle group is to be deployed as part of a United States marine expeditionary unit to take ”decisive action” against insurgents in Iraq.

It is understood the government is mindful of requests from Care International — the charity for which Hassan acts as country director in Iraq — to play down her British connections. However, Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, on Friday night described the video as ”extremely distressing”. He added: ”We hope all Iraqis will join us in calling for her immediate release.”

Hassan was born in Dublin and holds dual British and Iraqi citizenship, but is married to an Iraqi and has lived in the country for more than 30 years.

She was snatched from her car at around 7.30am on Tuesday morning on her way to work in the Khadra district of western Baghdad.

Within hours, a video showing her looking distressed, with her hands tied behind her back was shown on al-Jazeera.

The kidnapping has caused outrage, not least in Baghdad where Hassan, a former English teacher before she became an aid worker, was seen by most as a force for good.

An editor of al-Jazeera said the network received the tape on Friday but refused to say how or where. The grainy black and white tape showed a close-up of Mrs Hassan’s face as she became increasingly distressed while delivering the message. But there were few clues on the video as to who is behind the kidnapping.

There were none of the banners or hooded men with guns and swords that have characterised videos released by Tawhid and Jihad, the militants led by the Jordanian extremist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi who were responsible for the beheading of Bigley.

The BBC on Friday night decided not to use the video images, showing just a still instead. ”What we have to do is balance the news value against the level of personal stress and duress the person is under,” said a source.

Sky News, which earlier showed the full video, reverted in later broadcasts to showing a clip. ITN said it too was showing some of the footage. ”We are taking the view that we will show as little of the video as is necessary to tell the story,” a spokesperson said.

More than 140 foreigners have been kidnapped since April and at least 32 have been killed — none of them, however, foreign women.

So far the British government has limited its public involvement in the latest crisis to pronouncements of horror at the unfolding events, although diplomats will no doubt be working behind the scenes.

Care has been emphasising the fact that Hassan considers herself an Iraqi, as well as using its network of clerics, hospital workers and sheikhs to try to find out who is holding her and secure her release.

Her husband, Tahsine Ali Hassan, has made several emotional appeals for her release both in Arabic and English. ”I don’t know who has kidnapped her but they should know that my wife has worked almost all her life for the Iraqi people and considers herself an Iraqi,” he said on Thursday. ”My wife is apolitical. She is a humanitarian worker and I ask you to release her.”

Hassan headed an office of 60 Iraqi charity workers, and until Wednesday Care was the only charity to have maintained a continuous presence in Iraq since 1991. – Guardian Unlimited Â