Australia awaits news as hostage deadline passes

CANBERRA - Australia is nervously awaiting news of an engineer held hostage by Iraqi militants after a deadline set by his captors to kill him passed and the government said it was unsure how to handle the situation. 

The militants holding Douglas Wood, a 63-year-old who lives in California and is married to an American, demanded that Australia start withdrawing its troops from Iraq by Tuesday morning or they would kill Wood. 

"We haven't heard anything ... we just don't know what to think and we are continuing to work on the case," Foreign Minister Alexander Downer told Australian radio.  

"It's too unpredictable. The sense we have is that the people who have taken Douglas Wood are more politically driven. So that makes it hard to know how to handle it."  

Australia's conservative government, a staunch US ally that was among the first to join the war on Iraq two years ago, has stood firm on its refusal to give in to the militants.  

A new batch of 450 Australian troops is due to arrive in southern Iraq in the coming weeks to provide security and train the Iraqi army. They will take the total number of Australian troops in and around Iraq to about 1400.  

Downer has said that Wood may have been kidnapped from his Baghdad apartment up to two days before a two-minute video was delivered to news agencies eight days ago.  

That video showed Wood pleading at gunpoint for Australia, Britain and the United States to withdraw troops from Iraq. A second video was released on Friday, imposing their deadline.  

"I'm determined to try to get Douglas Wood out, but it's difficult, it's very difficult," Downer said.  

Wood's brother, Malcolm, pledged an undisclosed donation to the people of Iraq on Monday and asked the group holding Wood to tell them how they would like the money to be spent. He denied it was a ransom payment.  

Downer said on Tuesday the government had no objection to the Wood family offering a donation to a charity to help Iraq. 

The leader of Australia's Muslims, Sheikh Taj al-Din al-Hilali, who appealed to the militants, was also due to arrive in Baghdad on Tuesday in a last ditch bid to help free Wood.  

- REUTERS