Mystery deepens over hostages

By KIM SENGUPTA and RAYMOND WHITAKER in Baghdad

A Polish woman taken hostage in Iraq turned up at a news conference in Warsaw yesterday, saying she had been treated well but refusing to give any further details about her captivity or how she was freed.

The release of Teresa Borcz Khalifa added to the mystery surrounding the fate of Margaret Hassan, who appears to have been executed by her captors.

Yesterday, there was more confusion over whether a body found in Fallujah was hers, and many people, including Iraqi officials in Baghdad, cling to the absence of conclusive proof that she has been killed.

The cases of Hassan and Khalifa bear marked similarities. Both were in their 50s and had lived in Iraq for a long time.

Both were married to Iraqis and had acquired Iraqi citizenship while keeping that of their home countries.

But the kidnapping of Hassan, the country director for the charity Care International, caused widespread protests, including public demonstrations, unlike Khalifa's abduction.

Even Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, whose group has beheaded a number of hostages, called for Hassan to be released.

Confusion was heightened when Australian Prime Minister John Howard first told MPs in Canberra that a mutilated body found in Fallujah was that of Hassan, then retracted his claim.

The body was taken to Jordan for forensic tests, but senior diplomats say it does not appear to be hers.

No sooner was that information absorbed than military sources said the body of a second woman, also possibly Western, might have been found in the town by United States Marines.

Assumptions about Hassan's fate are based on a videotape received by the Arabic satellite channel al-Jazeera.

It showed British diplomats in Qatar the footage in which a woman said to be the British hostage was shot in the head.

The Foreign Office analysed the sequence and decided that it did show a killing but the victim's face was obscured by a blindfold and could not be positively identified.

The kidnapping itself has been puzzling, because it does not fall into the pattern of the hundreds of abductions, either commercially or politically motivated, in Iraq.

Even among the estimated 170 foreigners to have been seized, Hassan's case stands out. The kidnappers made no demands since an early video in which Hassan asked British Prime Minister Tony Blair to pull British troops out of Iraq.

No group has claimed responsibility. And, unlike other women hostages, Hassan was filmed without an Islamic headscarf.

Like the Care director, Khalifa was shown on al-Jazeera, pleading for her country to withdraw its troops from Iraq. In both cases the kidnappers' demand was rejected.

Yet while Poland refused to pull out its 2400 soldiers, Khalifa was released.

All that Marek Belka, the Polish Prime Minister, would say yesterday was that "officials of different services took part in her release in co-operation with institutions from many countries. I can't give you any details about the circumstances of this event, for two reasons.

"First, because of security concerns for our people ... and also because our partners expressed a firm wish not to reveal any details of the release operation."

The obsessive attention paid to the fate of Western hostages in their home countries obscures the fact that such kidnappings are atypical.

Most non-Iraqis who have been seized were not Westerners, but citizens of poorer countries who had come to work as sub-contractors.

Foreign hostages are far outnumbered by Iraqi victims of the kidnappers. Hundreds, if not thousands, have been seized for ransom, driving middle-class Iraqis to leave the country in droves, yet the phenomenon has gone virtually unreported abroad.

Only the other category receives attention - the increasing number of Iraqi police and national guardsmen taken prisoner and, as often as not, killed immediately.

Even beheading is becoming more commonplace.

American forces fighting to regain control of Mosul yesterday reported finding four headless bodies, all of local people, demonstrating once again that Iraqis are suffering most in the aftermath of war.

- INDEPENDENT

Herald Feature: Iraq