A Catholic archbishop was freed in Iraq on Tuesday, less than 24 hours after he was kidnapped by gunmen in the country’s northern city of Mosul.
Monsignor Basile Georges Casmoussa, the Iraqi city’s Syrian Catholic archbishop, was abducted by unidentified men on Monday afternoon during a pastoral visit in the city. He was released, unharmed, on Tuesday morning.
”He is fine. He was treated well by his captors,” Monsignor Thomas Habib of the Baghdad nuncio said in a telephone interview with Italian state television Rai.
In Rome, Pope John Paul II expressed ”great satisfaction” for the archbishop’s release, according to a statement by Vatican spokesperson Joaquin Navarro-Valls.
The Vatican had condemned the kidnapping on Monday, calling for his immediate release.
Religious sources in Iraq and in Rome denied that a ransom had been paid.
News of the archbishop’s release followed an earlier report by Misna, a Rome-based Catholic missionaries news agency, saying the kidnappers had demanded a $200 000 ransom.
The agency quoted another church official in Mosul, Monsignor Paulos Faraj Rahho, as saying the abductors had used Casmoussa’s cellphone to call the local diocese and make their demand.
Casmoussa was born in 1938 in the northern Iraqi town of Karakoche. He belongs to the Syrian Catholic Church, one of the branches of the Roman Catholic Church.
Despite a number of recent attacks against Christian churches in Iraq, the motives for the prelate’s abduction remained unclear.
”We do not know who was behind the kidnapping, in the same way that we do not know who was responsible for the kidnapping of a Chaldean priest a few days ago, who was held by gunmen for 24 hours before being released,” Monsignor Emmanuel Delly, the Baghdad patriarch of the Chaldean branch of the Catholic Church, told Misna.
According to the patriarch, the latest kidnapping was not a deliberate attack against Christians in Iraq.
”The real problem is that Iraq is in a state of chaos,” Delly said.
There are an estimated 750 000 Christians in predominantly Muslim Iraq. — Sapa-DPA