U.S. hostage threatened with death

From combined dispatches

BAGHDAD — Militants yesterday threatened to kill and mutilate Thomas Hamill, an American civilian captured during the ambush of a convoy west of Baghdad.

Earlier, the kidnappers of three Japanese taken hostage in Iraq said they will release them today in response to an appeal from Sunni clerics, the Arabic news channel Al Jazeera reported. The Japanese government confirmed the report, according to Kyodo news service.

In a videotape given to Al Jazeera, Mr. Hamill is shown standing in front of an Iraqi flag emblazoned with the words “Allahu Akbar,” or “God is great.” He gives his name and says he is 43 and from Mississippi.

A spokesman off camera demands that U.S. troops end their siege of the city of Fallujah, where four American civilians were killed and mutilated March 31.

“Our only demand is to remove the siege from the city of mosques,” a spokesman said in the tape. “If you don’t respond within 12 hours … he will be treated worse than those who were killed and burned in Fallujah.”

A TV announcer then quotes Mr. Hamill as saying his captors were not mistreating him.

“I am in good shape. I work for a private company that supports the military action,” the voice-over says, a likely reference to private U.S. firms that provide security in Iraq.

“I want my family to know that these people are taking care of me, and provide me with food, water and a place to sleep.”

Mr. Hamill was captured by gunmen who rocketed a fuel convoy on the road between Baghdad and Fallujah on Friday. He identified himself to a reporter for Australian television seconds before being whisked away in a car by gunmen.

Mr. Hamill, who was apparently wounded in the arm, spoke from the back seat of the car with a masked gunman next to him.

When asked by the reporter what happened, he said: “They attacked our convoy. That’s all I’m going to say.”

Two U.S. service members and several contract employees were still unaccounted for from the attacks on Friday, a Pentagon spokesman, Lt. Cmdr. Dan Hetlage, said yesterday

The kidnappers of the Japanese civilians, identifying themselves as the “Mujahideen Squadron,” said they made the decision to free them after mediation by the Islamic Clerics Committee, an Iraqi Sunni Muslim organization.

Abdel Satar Abdel Jabar, a senior official in the Muslim Clerics Association in Iraq, told Reuters news agency his group had issued a call that all abducted foreigners not linked to the U.S.-led occupation forces should be freed.

“We believe that the kidnapping of foreign civilians not connected to the occupation forces is forbidden,” he said.

In a statement, the kidnappers urged the Japanese public to press their government to withdraw its troops from Iraq, the station said.

Aid workers Noriaki Imai, 18, and Nahoko Takato, 34, and photojournalist Soichiro Koriyama, 32, were taken hostage in southern Iraq, but the exact date of their capture was not clear.

Videotape delivered to Al Jazeera, as well as Associated Press Television News, on Thursday showed the three Japanese blindfolded and threatened by masked men with guns and knives.

The kidnappers threatened to burn the hostages alive if Japan did not promise within three days to pull its troops out of Iraq. That deadline would end at 9 tonight.

The report of the expected release of the hostages was greeted with joy in Japan, where the government had rejected a demand to withdraw troops from Iraq in response to the captors’ demand.

In another video shot by Associated Press Television News, a masked man claiming to represent the “Martyr Ahmed Yassin Brigades” in the city of Ramadi, west of Baghdad, said 30 hostages from a variety of countries are being held by the group.

Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the founder of the Palestinian militant group Hamas, was killed in an Israeli air strike in the Gaza Strip last month.

Militants on Wednesday kidnapped two aid workers in Najaf: Fadi Ihsan Fadel, a Syrian-born Canadian who works for the New York-based International Rescue Committee, and Nabil Razouk, 30, an Arab from East Jerusalem who works for the U.S. Agency for International Development.

On Friday, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat made an appeal to the captors to free the two Arabs. Their fate is not known.