A French engineer working in Iraq was
kidnapped on Monday morning from a wealthy west Baghdad neighborhood, police said.
The engineer was driving through the upscale al-Mansour neighborhood where
he lived when gunmen stopped his car and kidnapped him around 9.20 am local
time.
Documents confirming his French nationality were found in his abandoned car, and police said he worked at a water purification plant.
The French embassy has not confirmed the kidnapping, which comes after four Western peace activists and a German
woman were abducted last week.
Earlier, former Iraqi interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi was forced to cut short an election campaign visit at Shi’ite Islam’s holiest shrine in Najaf after he was chased by an angry mob.
Police said Mr Allawi and a group he was with were set upon by men with batons who threw rocks, tomatoes and shoes – the latter a grave insult in Iraqi culture.
“We believe this was premeditated… it was very clear that they had evil intent to kill either the whole delegation or at least me,” Mr Allawi said.
He went on to describe a tense moment when one of his attackers allegedly took aim with a gun, but then dropped the weapon.
“This man who dropped the gun appeared to be panicked when the gun fell from his hand.”
Two police officers said Mr Allawi’s attackers were thought to be supporters of the radical Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, whose Mehdi Army staged a rebellion against the Allawi administration in Najaf last year before being crushed by US forces.
Unrest across Iraq
Elsewhere in Iraq, military operations in the restive Al-Anbar province have been wrapped up, with the latest clashes claiming the lives of 20 rebels with another five taken prisoner, the defence ministry said.
A day earlier, 19 Iraqi troops were killed.
A number of sweeps against the predominantly Sunni Muslim centres have drawn stinging rebukes from religious and political leaders in the area who have demanded an end to “operations against civilians.”
But President Jalal Talabani defended the operations, saying they “began after repeated attacks by rebels on US and Iraqi forces,” and that greater security was needed in the lead up to the December 15 polls.
The past month has seen the number of deaths in attacks jump from October’s toll of 407 to 666 – of them, 548 were civilians.
Further unrest has broken out in the capital Baghdad, where a car bomb was detonated narrowly missing a vehicle carrying Iraq’s chief justice, Midhat al-Mahmoudi.
Two bystanders were injured in the explosion which caused minor damage to nearby houses, police said.
Saddam trial resumes
The blast came on the eve of the resumption of hearings in the trial of Saddam Hussein and seven co-defendants accused of killing 148 people in the mainly Shi’ite town of Dujail in 1982.
Iraq’s national security adviser Mowaffaq al-Rubaie said that authorities had foiled a plot to attack the courthouse after a cache of Soviet-made rockets was found in Baghdad.
Proceedings are set to resume with testimony from 10 complainants to be heard in the coming days, two of whom will testify from behind a screen.
However, one of the five judges overseeing the trial has stepped down and been replaced after it became known that one of the defendants may have been involved in the execution of the judge’s brother.
For the purpose of safety during the trial, which has already seen the assassination of two defence lawyers, only the name of the chief judge Rizkar Mohammed Amin has been disclosed.
All eight defendants have pleaded not guilty, but if convicted could face the death penalty.
The trial is the first of about a dozen cases prosecutors are seeking to bring against Saddam and his key lieutenants.
Other likely charges are expected to relate to the 1988 poison gas attack on Halabja that killed 5,000 and the 1991 crackdown on rebellious Shi’ites and Kurds.
Calls mount for hostages’ release
Meanwhile, international efforts are gathering strength for the release of five kidnapped Westerners.
The Muslim Association of Britain (MAB) announced at the weekend that one of its leaders of Iraqi origin, Anas Al-Tikriti, had arrived in Iraq to help win the release of Briton, Norman Kember, who was taken along with two Canadians and an American.
The four are associated with the North American organisation, Christian Peacemaker Teams, which is opposed to the US-led occupation of Iraq, and were captured in Baghdad on November 26.
The US-based Muslim group, Council on American-Islamic Relations has also called for their freedom.
“Those who left the comfort of their homes to advocate for the rights of others that do not share their faith, ethnicity or language should be celebrated and honoured by Muslims, not humiliated by being made captives or God forbid, killed,” said the council’s chairman, Parvez Ahmed, in a statement.
In a video broadcast by the Al Jazeera Arabic television network, kidnappers demanded the release of all detainees in Iraqi and coalition prisons by December 8 or they would carry out the execution of Mr Kember, 74, along with American Tom Fox, 54, and Canadians James Loney, 41, and Harmeet Singh Sooden, 32.
From Berlin, Germany’s new Chancellor Angela Merkel has issued a joint appeal for the release of 43-year-old Susanne Osthoff who has been missing since November 25.
Amid reports that a deadline set by Ms Osthoff’s kidnappers had passed for Germany to stop training Iraqi security forces, the chancellor said every effort was being made to save her life.