Kidnappers seize charity chief in Baghdad

9.00am

BAGHDAD - Kidnappers seized the British-Iraqi head of an international charity group in Baghdad on Tuesday and later she was shown sitting anxiously and alone in a video broadcast by an Arabic television station.

Margaret Hassan, who has dual nationality and has lived in Iraq for about 30 years, was abducted at 7.30am (local time), said a spokeswoman for Care International in London.

The kidnapping occurred two weeks after militants in Iraq beheaded another Briton, engineer Kenneth Bigley.

Hostage-taking, suicide bombings and sabotage have kept Iraq in bloody chaos since last year's US-led invasion.

Four Iraqi National Guards were killed and up to 80 wounded in a mortar attack on their base at Tarmiya, about 25km north of Baghdad, a Defence Ministry statement said.

A suicide car bomber attacked a US military convoy in the western town of Habbaniyah. There was no immediate word on casualties. The US military said it had no information on the incident but would investigate.

The Care International spokeswoman said Hassan, head of the charity's operations in Iraq, had deep roots in the country.

"We want to stress that she sees herself as an Iraqi. Iraq is her home. She has been living there for many years and would never consider coming back to Britain," said the spokeswoman.

Most international aid agencies withdrew their foreign staff after two Italian women aid workers were kidnapped last month. The pair were later freed.

Kidnappers have taken scores of foreign hostages since April and killed at least 35 of them. Iraqis seen as cooperating with US forces or the US-backed Iraqi interim government have also been targeted.

Arabic Al Jazeera television aired footage of Hassan after her capture, sitting in a room and looking anxious. It showed close-ups of her identification cards and said an unnamed Iraqi group had said it had kidnapped her.

A militant group led by Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a declared al Qaeda ally and Washington's top enemy in Iraq, said it had beheaded Bigley and two Americans seized with him last month.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair said his government would do everything possible to secure Hassan's release.

"This is someone who has lived in Iraq for 30 years, someone who is immensely respected, someone who is doing her level best to help the country," said Blair.

"It shows you the type of people we are up against, that they are prepared to kidnap somebody like this."

US warplanes struck overnight at what the military said were Zarqawi-linked targets in the rebel-held city of Falluja west of Baghdad.

The government has threatened to attack Falluja unless Zarqawi's men are handed over, as part of its drive to pacify all of Iraq before parliamentary elections due in January.

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said a crackdown on rebels in hotspots like Falluja had to be carefully calibrated.

"In these kind of situations you have two wars going on," he said in London. "You have the war for minds and hearts of the people as well as efforts to try and bring down the violence."

US Secretary of State Colin Powell said Washington was doing all it could to enable Iraqis to conduct elections.

"It's still possible to have the kind of election we want to have by the end of January. The key is security and building up Iraqi forces to make them competent, fully equipped and able to do the job," he told the USA Today newspaper in an interview.

The United States has asked staunch ally Britain to send troops now based in southern Iraq to more volatile areas closer to Baghdad to free up US units to fight guerrillas.

Britain is expected to agree in the next few days to the request. A British team was on the ground on Tuesday to look at the logistics of such a move, which has revived anger in Britain to Prime Minister Tony Blair's support for the war.

"We are very sympathetic to this proposal," British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said.

Saboteurs blew up part of a northern oil pipeline and set it on fire, but exports to Turkey kept flowing, oil officials said.

Supply disruptions in Iraq and elsewhere, along with fears over tightly stretched supplies as well as strong demand, have helped boost oil prices more than 60 per cent this year.

- REUTERS

Herald Feature: Iraq