Prayers continue for Iraq hostages

A Quaker congregation in the United States is continuing to hold weekly vigils for a group, including an Auckland student, being held hostage in Iraq.

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.

The Associated Press reported today that weekly vigils were being held for Mr Sooden and fellow captives US citizen Tom Fox, 54; Canadians James Loney, 41, and Norman Kember, a 74-year-old retired British professor -- all members of Christian Peacemaker Teams.

"We're still holding out hope and praying for their release," Anne Bacon, clerk of the Hopewell Centre Meeting, said.

Lisa Schirch, a professor at Eastern Mennonite University who taught Mr Fox in a peace-building course last year, said one positive result of the hostage situation has been a renewed interest in abductions around the world.

"It's drawing attention to the fact that other families don't know where their loved ones are, either," she said.

Christian Peacemaker Teams, a Chicago group, is opposed to the war and US military presence in Iraq.

Mr Fox, who arrived in Baghdad in October 2004, contemplated the possibility that he would be kidnapped.

"I am to stand firm against the kidnapper as I am to stand firm against the soldier," he wrote in one of the first entries in his Web log detailing his work in Iraq as a Christian peace activist.

Hope continues for the hostages and this week 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.

- NZPA