BAGHDAD, 21 September 2004 — An Al-Qaeda-linked group yesterday beheaded one of the three Western hostages and posted the grisly video of his execution on the Internet.
The video identified the hostage as Eugene Armstrong and showed a masked man sawing his head off with a knife. The video showed the banner of Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi’s Tawhid wal Jihad group, which said it kidnapped the hostage along with another American and a Briton in central Baghdad last Thursday.
Armstrong’s body was later recovered and identified. The video was the first word on the three men since a 48-hour execution deadline set by the group on Saturday expired earlier in the day.
Tawhid wal Jihad said in footage posted on the Internet on Saturday it would kill the three men unless Iraqi women were freed from Abu Ghraib and Umm Qasr jails in 48 hours.
The men were seized from their house in an upscale neighborhood of Baghdad on Thursday by a group of gunmen.
The US military says no women are being held in the two prisons specified, but that two are in US custody. Dubbed “Dr. Germ” and “Mrs. Anthrax” by US forces, they are accused of working on Saddam Hussein’s weapons programs and are in a prison for high-profile detainees.
Zarqawi’s Tawhid wal Jihad group has claimed responsibility for most of the bloodiest suicide bomb attacks in Iraq since the fall of Saddam. It has already beheaded several hostages, including US telecoms engineer Nicholas Berg in May and South Korean driver Kim Sun-il in June.
The group released Filipino captive Angelo de la Cruz in July after Manila bowed to its demands to pull out troops.
Meanwhile, another group of militants freed 18 Iraqi soldiers after an appeal from Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr. Al-Jazeera Arabic television said the kidnappers — the Mohammad bin Abdullah Brigades — had released the National Guard soldiers at Sadr’s request. The group also warned anyone against cooperating with what it called the “occupying forces” in Iraq, it added.
The channel had on Sunday aired a video from the group which said it would kill the soldiers unless the Iraqi authorities released Sadr aide Hazem Al-Araji within 48 hours.
A senior aide to Sadr, Ali Sumeisim, held a news conference earlier yesterday to denounce the kidnapping of the guardsmen and call for their release.
In other violence, gunmen killed a cleric who was entering a mosque in Baghdad to perform noon prayers yesterday — the second attack on a cleric belonging to an influential association of Sunni clerics in as many days — the group said.
Sheikh Mohammed Jadoa Al-Janabi, was killed in Baghdad’s predominantly Shiite Al-Baya neighborhood.
He was unarmed and had no security guards.
— Additional input from agencies
