Egyptian Islamist urges militants to free German hostages in Iraq

Mar 11, 2007, 17:03 GMT

Cairo - Prominent Egyptian Islamist Sheikh Osama Mustafa Hassan Nasr, known as Abu Omar al-Masri, called Sunday on Iraqi militants holding two German citizens as hostages to let them go.

'I plead with you - for the sake of Allah - to immediately free the two captives,' al-Masri told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa over the phone, in a message to the militants.

Militants of a little-known group calling itself the brigade of the Arrows of Righteousness are holding a German woman and her son captives, and threatened Saturday to kill them unless Germany starts withdrawing its troops from Afghanistan within 10 days.

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

Al-Masri, a former Imam of a mosque in Milan, said he saw the video.

Al-Masri himself was reportedly kidnapped in Italy and then taken to Cairo in 2004. He was released briefly and detained by Egyptian authorities as a terrorist suspect, and was recently released.

'I am your brother in Allah - who was kidnapped from the streets of Milan on 27 February 2003 by CIA agents, following campaigns where I condemned the injustice of the US State Department towards the Afghan and Iraqi people,' he said in his message to the militants.

Al-Masri, who in his own words spent 'four years in captivity, (and) imprisonment,' urged the kidnappers not to kill the mother and her son.

'What are the German mother and the son guilty of? What have they got to do with the foreign policy of their country?' he said, adding that Muslims in the west 'face troubles' and that killing the German citizens will have an even more negative effects.

'Have mercy on your (Muslim) brothers and let go of the German mother and her son,' he added.

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 his wife was pregnant.

'I'm asking you to help me,' she sobbed in the video broadcast. '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.

The video had 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.