United States and British forces freed three Christian peace activists — a Briton and two Canadians — without firing a shot early on Thursday, ending a four-month hostage drama in which an American among the group was shot to death and dumped on a Baghdad street earlier this month. At least 53 Iraqis died in violence.
The Iraqi interior ministry said the captives were rescued in the joint US-British operation in rural area north-west of Baghdad, between the towns of Mishahda, 30km north of Baghdad, and the western suburb of Abu Ghraib, 20km from downtown.
British officials in Baghdad said those freed were Canadians James Loney (41) and Harmeet Singh Sooden (32), and Briton Norman Kember (74).
The US and British military in Iraq would provide no information on the operation, but Doug Pritchard, co-director of the Christian Peacemakers Teams, said no shots were fired.
At a Toronto news conference, Pritchard also said the kidnappers were not present when the US-British forces freed the hostages, who worked for the organisation.
In London, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said he was ”delighted that now we have a happy ending in this terrible ordeal”. He confirmed that US and British forces had fired no shots during the rescue.
Straw said Kember was in ”reasonable condition” in Baghdad’s Green Zone. The two Canadians required hospital treatment, he said, but gave no further details.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s office said the prime minister was ”delighted by the news” of the trio’s release.
”He is particularly pleased for those released and their families. He congratulates everyone involved in the operation to rescue the hostages,” Downing Street said in a statement.
Bombings
Elsewhere in Baghdad, 35 people died in bombings and one was killed in Iskandariyah, south of the capital. More than 50 people, many of them children, were wounded, police said.
A suicide car bomber detonated his explosives at the entrance to the interior ministry’s major crimes unit in Baghdad’s central Karradah district, killing at least 25 people and wounding more than 35, police said.
A second car bomb hit a market area outside a Shi’ite Muslim mosque in the mostly mixed Shiite-Sunni neighbourhood of Shurta in south-west Baghdad. At least six people were killed and more than 20 wounded, police said.
Roadside bombs targeting police patrols killed four others in Baghdad and at least one in Iskandariyah, 50km south of Baghdad. Police said dozens were wounded.
Eleven more bodies were found throughout the country, meanwhile, in the continuing string of shadowy sectarian killings.
Two police officers were killed and two were wounded when gunmen ambushed their convoy in north Baghdad, an attack that police said was an aborted attempt to free detainees who were being transferred to the northern city of Mosul.
Elsewhere throughout the capital, two police were killed in gun battles with insurgents and two civilians were gunned down in drive-by shootings.
Hostages
The hostage aid workers disappeared on November 26. The previously unknown Swords of Righteousness Brigades claimed responsibility for kidnapping them.
The organisation issued a statement on its website expressing joy over the hostage release.
”Christian Peacemaker Teams rejoices with their families and friends at the expectation of their return to their loved ones and community. Together we have endured uncertainty, hope, fear, grief and now joy during the four months since they were abducted in Baghdad,” the statement said.
The body of American Tom Fox (54), of Clear Brook, Virginia, was found on a Baghdad street on March 9. It was not clear when he was killed, but he was absent from a February 28 video that showed the three hostages freed on Thursday.
Other Americans taken hostage in Iraq and killed in addition to Fox were Ronald Schulz (40), an industrial electrician from Anchorage, Alaska; Jack Hensley (48), a civil engineer from Marietta, Georgia.; Eugene ”Jack” Armstrong (52), formerly of Hillsdale, Michigan; and Nicholas Berg (26), a businessman from West Chester, Pennsylvania.
Still missing is Jill Carroll, a freelance writer for the Christian Science Monitor who was kidnapped on January 7 in Baghdad. She has appeared in three videotapes delivered by her kidnappers to Arab satellite television stations.
The last hostage to be freed in a military operation was Douglas Wood, an Australian rescued in west Baghdad by US and Iraqi forces on June 15 after 47 days in captivity.
In Thursday’s attack on the Baghdad crimes unit, it was not immediately clear how many of those killed were bystanders and how many were employees of the unit, which investigates large-scale crimes, police Lieutenant Colonel Falah al-Mohammadawi said.
In the roadside blast in Baghdad’s mostly Sunni Muslim neighbourhood of Azamiyah, two police officers and two bystanders were killed, according to police Lieutenant Ahmed Mohammed Ali. At least seven others — two police officers and five civilians — were wounded, he said.
Another bomb in Karradah wounded four civilians but no police in the district, which is mostly Shi’ite but has a large Sunni minority.
In Iskandariyah, 50km south of Baghdad, a roadside bomb killed one police officer and wounded two pedestrians, police said.
Back in the capital, another civilian was seriously wounded by an Iraqi army patrol that was shooting in the air to clear traffic in the western neighbourhood of Yarmouk, police said.
Prison
Thursday’s attacks came after insurgents, emboldened a day after a successful jailbreak, laid siege to another prison on Wednesday.
This time, US troops and a special Iraqi unit thwarted the pre-dawn attack south of Baghdad, overwhelming the gunmen and capturing 50 of them, police said.
Although Wednesday’s raid failed, the insurgents’ ability to put together such large and well-armed bands of fighters underlined concerns about the ability of Iraqi police and military to take over the fight from US troops. Sixty militants participated in the assault, which attempted to free more jailed Sunni insurgents, police said.
The attack on the prison in Madain, 25km south-east of Baghdad, began with insurgents firing 10 mortar rounds. They then stormed the facility, which is run by the interior ministry, a predominantly Shi’ite organisation and heavily infiltrated by members of various Shi’ite militias.
Four police officers — including the commander of the special unit — died in a two-hour gun battle, which was subdued only after American forces arrived. Among the 50 captured, police said, one was Syrian.
The US military did not respond to a request for comment about its role in the counterattack. The raid came a day after 100 Sunni gunmen freed 33 prisoners and wrecked a jail, police station and courthouse in Muqdadiyah, a town north-east of Baghdad near the Iranian border.
Madain, the site of Wednesday’s attack, is at the northern tip of Iraq’s Sunni-dominated ”Triangle of Death”, a farming region rife with sectarian violence — retaliatory kidnappings and killings in the underground conflict between Sunnis and Shi’ites.
Police have discovered hundreds of corpses in the past four weeks, victims of religious militants on a rampage of revenge killing. At least 21 more bodies were found on Wednesday, including those of 16 Shi’ite pilgrims discovered on a Baghdad highway, police said. Millions were returning home on Wednesday at the conclusion of an important Shi’ite commemoration in the holy city of Karbala this week.
In the northern town of Beiji, meanwhile, a mortar fell on a government facility that Deputy Prime Minister Ahmed Chalabi was visiting on Wednesday, an aide said. Chalabi was not harmed and later returned to Baghdad, the aide said on condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to release the information.
Chalabi, who is also the interim oil minister, was believed to have been visiting the refinery in Beiji, the nation’s largest. — Sapa-AP