Iraqi gets life for Hassan kidnapping

Margaret Hassan

BAGHDAD - A Baghdad court has sentenced an Iraqi man to life in prison in connection with the 2004 abduction and killing of Iraqi-British aid worker Margaret Hassan.

A court official said that Mustafa Salman had been convicted on what appeared to be charges of aiding and abetting Hassan's killers. Two other defendants were freed.

Salman was sentenced a few hours after the start of the trial, believed to be one of the first known trials for the abduction or killing of a foreign-born civilian in Iraq.

More than 200 foreigners and thousands of Iraqis have been kidnapped since US-led forces invaded in 2003 to topple Saddam Hussein. More than 40 of have been killed and some beheaded.

The judge said Salman had received a plastic bag from an associate who asked him to hold on to it. Four months later Iraqi security forces raided Salman's home and found Hassan's purse and documents in the bag.

Hassan, an Iraqi-British national who had lived in Iraq for more than three decades after marrying an Iraqi engineer, was head of the Iraqi operation of the CARE International charity.

She was abducted in Baghdad in October 2004 and killed about a month later, after appealing in video messages made by her abductors for British forces to withdraw from Iraq. No group has claimed responsibility and her body has not been found.

Hassan's sister Deirdre Fitzsimmons on Monday accused Britain of effectively condemning Hassan to death by abandoning her family and refusing to talk to her captors.

Fitzsimmons told BBC radio that the British government had treated four phone calls from her sister's captors as hoaxes.

"We were advised...by the powers that be that these were hoax calls. But after all they were made on my sister's mobile telephone," she said.

Hassan's kidnapping came at the height of a wave of abductions of foreigners in Iraq, including two Italian aid workers, the British contractor Kenneth Bigley, who was also killed, and two American contractors working with him.

The abductions are usually carried out by Islamic militant groups, or criminal gangs seeking cash.

Fitzsimmons said her brother-in-law was left in a house on his own without any recording equipment and was told to emphasise his wife's "Iraqiness" and tell the kidnappers if they called that the British didn't want to be involved.

"The last phone calls were made on November 7. They demanded to negotiate. I don't think he knew what to do. He did the best he could," Fitzsimmons said. "After all this was a man in a house on his own. His wife had been taken hostage. He had seen terrible videos of her and he was really left on his own."

Hassan was murdered the following day.

In May 2005, US and Iraqi forces arrested several people in a raid southeast of Baghdad believed to be linked to Hassan's murder. Police said at the time that 11 people had been detained, and that five had admitted complicity in the killing.

Hassan, 59, was widely known in the aid community as a tireless worker for impoverished and marginalised Iraqis.

Fitzsimmons, her voice breaking with emotion on Monday, appealed to the authorities to find out where her sister's body was so it could be returned to England for burial.

"These men know where my sister is buried and all we want to do now is to bring her home," she said. "Her husband wants her to come home to England and we want to bury her with the respect that she deserves.

- REUTERS