Blair will 'cry blood', warn hostage executioners
British hostage Kenneth Bigley’s life was tonight in the blood-stained hands of a terrorist who has severed the heads of two other captives.
There appeared to be little hope of Mr Bigley being spared as US and Iraqi officials seemed at loggerheads over the future of a jailed woman scientist dubbed Dr Germ.
The release of all women prisoners in Iraqi jails was one of the kidnap group’s demands when they seized 62-year-old Mr Bigley and two Americans last week.
Only Mr Bigley, 62, was believed alive today but time was fast running out. His kidnappers warned that Tony Blair will “cry blood”.
His two work colleagues have been savagely beheaded, probably both by the same man – al-Qaida ally Abu Musab al-Zarqawi – whose spiritual leader has just been killed in a US air strike.
An Islamic website that announced the beheading of the second American hostage threatened that Mr Bigley would also die if the British government did not act.
“The British prisoner will meet the same fate if the British government does not carry out what it should do for his release,” it said, adding that President George Bush would die in “rage” and Prime Minister Tony Blair would “cry blood”.
The posting, the second on the web to refer to the purported killing, did not say what the British government should do or give a deadline.
In the US state of Georgia, a spokesman for the family of hostage Jack Hensley has received confirmation that the headless body handed over to US officials in Iraq is his.
The family was told the news today, the day Hensley would have celebrated his 49th birthday.
His decapitated body had been found along with the head in a black plastic bag on Tuesday night in Baghdad.
His brother, Ty, said Hensley’s wife, Pati, was “extraordinarily devastated. She is a widow now. She is a mother of a 13-year-old daughter. She’s also a caregiver of two mothers. What has fallen upon her is an extraordinary amount of weight”.
The latest web message to admit to the second beheading appeared to be on Tawhid and Jihad’s own site, which had been disabled much of the last week but became accessible again late Tuesday or early today.
The initial claim, which appeared on another website signed with the pseudonym Abu Maysara al-Iraqi, had not mentioned the Briton.
A video of the killing by Tawhid and Jihad that Al-Iraqi’s posting said would be released “soon” had not materialised today.
Tawhid and Jihad – Arabic for Monotheism and Holy War – has claimed responsibility for the murders of at least six hostages in the past.
In addition to kidnappings, the group is linked to suicide car bombings and co-ordinated gun attacks against coalition forces, Iraqi security and politicians and Iraqi Shiites – al-Zarqawi is believed to be trying to foment Sunni-Shiite violence to make Iraq even more volatile and harder to govern. The Americans have offered €20.5m for him – dead or alive.
American engineer Eugene Armstrong, 52, was the first of three men abducted last Thursday to be killed, apparently on Monday. Video of his beheading was posted on Islamic Web sites within an hour of an al-Iraqi statement promising it.
Armstrong’s body was found in Baghdad hours before news of his beheading became public.
Hensley and Bigley were kidnapped with Armstrong. The brief statement on the Tawhid and Jihad site did not identify the latest victim by name, but indicated it was Hensley.
“The lions of Tawhid and Jihad carried out the slaughter of the second American prisoner before the end of the specific deadline,” the statement said.
Hours after the claim of the second beheading – the Iraqi Justice Ministry said the government and the US forces had decided a female prisoner in American custody, Dr Rihab Rashid Taha – the scientist known as Dr Germ for helping Saddam Hussein make weapons out of anthrax, – would be released on bail.
The ministry denied the decision as linked to the kidnappers’ demands.
But later the US embassy said the two high-profile women prisoners in American custody will not be released immediately.
The US military says the only women in its custody in Iraq are Taha and Huda Salih Mahdi Ammash, a biotech researcher known as Mrs Anthrax.
Sheik Abdul-Sattar Abdul-Jabbar, a member of the Association of Muslim Scholars, conservative Iraqi clerics who oppose the US presence in Iraq but have interceded in the past to win the release of foreign hostages, questioned the claim of only two female prisoners in American and British custody.
Abdul-Jabbar claimed there were “tens, perhaps hundreds of Iraqi women prisoners in the occupation’s jail that were supposed to be released before this tragedy”.
The spiritual leader of the group holding Mr Bigley has been killed in a US air strike. Islamic clerics said today.
Sheik Abu Anas al-Shami, 35, was killed when a missile hit his car in Baghdad last Friday, said the clerics.
