Radical Militants Threaten To Kill UK Hostage In 10 Days

December 5, 2007

If this is your first time visiting National Terror Alert you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed. The National terror Alert feed features breaking news, alerts and bulletins on demand and it's free of charge..
You will only see this message on your first visit to the site. Thanks for visiting!

The threat included this ominous statement, “This hostage will be killed as a first warning, which would be followed with details that you would not want to know”.

Militants holding five Britons in Iraq threatened in a video yesterday to kill one of them in 10 days as a “first warning” unless Britain withdrew its troops.

The hostage was one of five Britons a computer instructor and his four bodyguards kidnapped by gunmen from inside a Finance Ministry building in Baghdad on May 29.

The video, dated November 18, set a deadline of 10 days from the date it was broadcast for Britain to pull its troops from Iraq.

British troops are deployed in the mainly Shia south.

“My name is Jason. Today is November 18. I have been here now 173 days and I feel we’ve been forgotten,” said one of the hostages on the video as he sat in front of a banner of the Shi’ite Islamic Resistance in Iraq.

On each side of him, masked men stood guard in black combat fatigues, holding US army-issue M16 assault rifles. The brief video was the first evidence the men were alive since they were kidnapped by an armed gang dressed in police commando uniforms at the Finance Ministry.

A statement issued with the video, which was broadcast by the Arabic satellite station al-Arabiya, described it as a “first warning” to Britain to pull its 5000 troops out of Basra airport base within 10 days of the film’s release.

“This hostage will be killed as a first warning, which would be followed with details that you would not want to know,” the statement said.

Britain has not disclosed the names of the five hostages, and the Foreign Office has argued that giving publicity to the case would complicate any negotiations for their release.

Yesterday, the Foreign Office denounced the video and said that it would only cause further distress to the hostages’ families and friends.

Read More