Wednesday, September 1, 2004
Twelve Nepalese hostages beheaded in Iraq
Rawya Rageh (AP) Dubai, August 31
Twelve Nepalese taken hostage in Iraq by the Islamist Army of Ansar al-Sunna group have been beheaded, according to a statement posted on an Islamist website on Tuesday.
"We have carried out the sentence of God against 12 Nepalese who came from their country to fight the Muslims and to serve the Jews and the Christians ... believing in Buddha as their God," said a statement on Tuesday on the site by the military committee of the Army of Ansar al-Sunna.
The Nepalese Foreign Ministry said it could not confirm the report of the hostages' deaths. The 12 had been reported kidnapped Aug 20.
The video showed a masked man apparently slitting the throat of a blindfolded man lying on the ground. Other footage showed an armed man firing single shots from an assault rifle at the back of the heads of 11 others.
A statement on the Web site vowed to keep fighting the Americans in Iraq.
"America today has used all its force, as well as the help of others, to fight Islam under the so-called war on terror, which is nothing but a vicious crusade against Muslims," the statement said.
At the end of the four-minute video, a man reads another statement off-camera, vowing to fight the Iraqi government. "We will work on exterminating them until the last fighter," he said.
Iyad Mansoor, director-general of the Morning Star Company, a Jordan-based services firm which had contracted the 12 Nepalese workers for jobs in Iraq, said he had no information on the beheading of the Nepalese captives.
"I'm shocked to hear such news," he told The Associated Press. "The last I heard was that the Nepalese government was in contact with Iraqi clergymen and others in an effort to set the 12 men free."
In an Aug 20 Web statement, a group calling itself the Ansar al-Sunna Army claimed to be holding 12 Nepalese hostages and demanded Nepal stop sending workers to Iraq. The same group later claimed to have kidnapped and beheaded an Arab-American it said was a CIA spy, but the US Embassy in Baghdad had said it was unaware of an American hostage.
At least 80 people have been kidnapped by insurgents and criminal gangs in Iraq in recent months. Some kidnappings were designed to extort ransom while others had the political motive of trying to force foreign troops and companies to leave the country.
© HT Media Ltd. 2004.