No news is good news for NZ hostage in Iraq

The unknown fate of four hostages being held in Iraq could suggest they are still alive and a ransom was being negotiated, a terrorism expert says.

The four peace activists, including 32-year-old Auckland student Harmeet Singh Sooden, were kidnapped in Baghdad on November 29.

Their captors, members of the Swords of Righteousness Brigade, threatened to kill them if the United States and Britain did not free Iraq detainees by December 12.

The deadline for their demands passed without word of the hostages fate.

Paul Buchanan, a former CIA intelligence consultant and senior politics lecturer at Auckland University, said the silence from the kidnappers probably indicated a ransom was being negotiated.

"This is not the work of a jihad group, but a criminal group and the silence is good news," he told a Wellington daily newspaper yesterday.

About 80 per cent of aid workers kidnapped in Iraq and later freed had been taken by criminal groups who had been paid a ransom, the paper reported.

Mr Buchanan said the criminal groups desired the money, but for the jihad groups the execution of western hostages was more powerful.

"Holding them for ransom is not the point, it's the symbolism of their execution."

Mr Sooden, Briton Norman Kember, 74, Canada's James Loney, 41, and American Tom Fox, 54, were aid workers with Christian Peacemaker Teams.

The captors accused the men of being undercover spies.

- NZPA