Iraq abductors seek German pullout in Afghanistan (Roundup)

Mar 10, 2007, 13:55 GMT

   Cairo - Iraqi militants holding a German woman and her son threatened Saturday to kill their captives unless Germany starts withdrawing its troops from Afghanistan within 10 days.

   The 61-year-old woman made a tearful plea for help to German Chancellor Angela Merkel in a video posted by the abductors on an Islamist website.

   'I'm asking you to help me,' she sobbed. 'We're Germans as well. These people want to kill my son before my eyes and then kill me. I don't want to die like this,' she said in German.

   Berlin-born Hannelore Marianne K. and her adult son were seized on February 6 by armed men who burst into their family home in Baghdad. She said her son was married and indicated that his wife might be pregnant.

   The video showed three masked men standing behind the woman, who was wearing a loosely tied headdress and holding the hand of her son crouching next to her.

   One of the kidnappers read a statement in Arabic on behalf of a little-known group calling itself the brigade of the Arrows of Righteousness.

   'We Muslims are one large nation,' he said. The Muslims in Afghanistan are therefore just as close as the Muslims in Iraq, he added, accusing German forces of shelling Afghan civilians in their villages.

'We give the German government 10 days from the date of this statement to announce and start the withdrawal of their troops from Afghanistan, otherwise ... they will not even see the bodies of these two agents,' the man said.

   At the beginning of the video, the abductors showed the passport of the woman on which her name was clearly visible.

   The German government declined to comment on the kidnappers' demand for a pullout from Afghanistan where Germany has 3,000 troops serving with the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF).

   On Friday, the German parliament approved the deployment of six Tornado reconnaissance warplanes to Afghanistan to assist NATO forces in their ground offensive against Islamist Taliban rebels.

   A spokeswoman for the German Foreign Ministry in Berlin said a crisis panel set up after the kidnapping was studying the latest information.

   The government has in the past imposed a news blackout on the abduction so as not to compromise efforts to obtain the release of the two hostages.

   Media reports said the woman was married to an Iraqi professor and had lived in Iraq for more than 20 years.

   The abductions were the third involving Germans in violence-torn Iraq since the US invasion in March 2003.

   Three other Germans kidnapped in the past 16 months have all been released unharmed amid reports that ransoms were paid.

   Engineers Rene Braeunlich and Thomas Nitzschke were freed last May after 99 days in captivity. Archaeologist Susanne Osthoff was released in December 2005 after spending three weeks in the hands of her captors.

Mideast analysts did not rule out that the video might be a ploy by the kidnappers to increase pressure on the German government to pay a ransom.

Security sources quoted by the Bild am Sonntag newspaper speculated that the abductors were disappointed at the response in Germany to the kidnapping had made the video with their captors begging for their lives.