Fellow hostage still missing after Hamill escape
Truck driver Thomas Hamill, who has escaped from his captors in Iraq, was among seven employees of Halliburton subsidiary KBR, formerly known as Kellogg, Brown & Root, missing since an attack on their convoy west of Baghdad, about 90 miles from Tikrit.
The bodies of four of the employees have since been found.
The remains of a second military man missing in the convoy attack, Sergeant Elmer Krause of Greensboro, North Carolina, were identified on April 23, according to a statement issued by the Department of Defence.
Also kidnapped in the attack was a US soldier, Pfc Keith M Maupin, whose fate remains unknown since he was seen alive days later in video footage aired on the Arab television station al-Jazeera.
The day after his abduction, 43-year-old Hamill’s kidnappers released video footage of him standing in front of an Iraqi flag. A spokesman off camera demanded that US troops end their siege of the city of Fallujah, where four American civilians were killed and mutilated last week.
“Our only demand is to remove the siege from the city of mosques,” a spokesman said in a tape given to the al-Jazeera television network.
“If you don’t respond within 12 hours … he will be treated worse than those who were killed and burned in Fallujah.”
