At least eight employees, including Egyptians and Iraqis, of the Egyptian telecom giant Orascom have been kidnapped in Iraq within two days, the interior ministry and a company employee said yesterday.
"Last night [Thursday] at 10pm, armed men in a BMW drove up to their offices in the Harithiya district [of Baghdad] and kidnapped them," an interior ministry spokesman said.
The office's guards were tied up and the abductors stole computers and weapons from the office before snatching the two Egyptian nationals -- Mustapha Abdel Latif and Mahmoud Turki, the source said.
The Egyptian embassy confirmed the abductions.
Orascom -- the largest telecommunications firm in the Middle East -- was awarded a contract last October to provide mobile phone services to Iraq's Baghdad region.
In addition, an expatriate employee with the company said he was informed Wednesday of the abduction earlier the same day of at least six maintenance workers for the firm, including four Egyptians.
Those kidnappings took place near the western town of Qaim on the Syrian border, he said, after earlier reports that they had gone missing close to the rebel town of Fallujah, west of the capital.
He said "the group included four Egyptian employees of OCI [Orascom Construction Industries] and at least two Iraqis and maybe more."
The Egyptian embassy refused to comment on the four OCI employees.
Meanwhile, Iraqis have distributed 50,000 pamphlets here pleading for the life of British hostage Kenneth Bigley, whose two US colleagues have been beheaded by his captors, a British source said yesterday.
The leaflets, handed out Thursday night in Baghdad's Mansour district where the British engineer and his two American colleagues were taken at gunpoint from their home a week ago, includes a heart-rending plea from his loved ones, the source said.
Iraqis handing out the tracts in Arabic declined to give their names.
"This is a personal appeal from a family whose son is missing. A family man called Ken Bigley is being held somewhere in your community," a translation of the pamphlet read.
"We are Ken's family. Ken's mother, brothers, wife and child love him dearly. We are appealing for your help. We are waiting for Ken to go home ... We appeal to those who have taken him to return Ken to us. Do you know where Ken is? Do you have any information about his whereabouts?"
The pamphlet also provides a number to phone in information.
In related news, US artillery and aircraft fire pounded sectors of the Iraqi rebel city of Fallujah yesterday, sending up clouds of smoke, residents said.
The smoke shrouded the southeastern industrial zone, which houses mainly metal and mechanical workshops, as residents charged that US forces had lobbed artillery into the area.
Within minutes, the artillery fire was followed by an air strike on the Shuhada district in southern Fallujah.
The US military has intensified its strikes on Fallujah this month, targeting suspected hideouts of the insurgency and top al-Qaeda operative Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi.
The city, 50km west of Baghdad, has been a no-go zone for US troops since a deadly offensive in April.
Also see story:
Taiwan has arranged for about 8 million barrels of crude oil, or about one-third of its monthly needs, to be shipped from the Red Sea this month to bypass the Strait of Hormuz and ease domestic supply pressures, CPC Corp, Taiwan (CPC, 台灣中油) said yesterday. The state-run oil company has worked with Middle Eastern suppliers to secure routes other than the Strait of Hormuz, through which about 20 percent of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas typically passes, CPC chairman Fang Jeng-zen (方振仁) said at a meeting of the legislature’s Economics Committee in Taipei. Suppliers in Saudi Arabia have indicated they
A global survey showed that 60 percent of Taiwanese had attained higher education, second only to Canada, the Ministry of the Interior said. Taiwan easily surpassed the global average of 43 percent and ranked ahead of major economies, including Japan, South Korea and the US, data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) for 2024 showed. Taiwan has a high literacy rate, data released by the ministry showed. As of the end of last year, Taiwan had 20.617 million people aged 15 or older, accounting for 88.5 percent of the total population, with a literacy rate of 99.4 percent, the data
CCP ‘PAWN’? Beijing could use the KMT chairwoman’s visit to signal to the world that many people in Taiwan support the ‘one China’ principle, an academic said Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) yesterday arrived in China for a “peace” mission and potential meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), while a Taiwanese minister detailed the number of Chinese warships currently deployed around the nation. Cheng is visiting at a time of increased Chinese military pressure on Taiwan, as the opposition-dominated Legislative Yuan stalls a government plan for US$40 billion in extra defense spending. Speaking to reporters before going to the airport, Cheng said she was going on a “historic journey for peace,” but added that some people felt uneasy about her trip. “If you truly love Taiwan,
NEW LOW: The council in 2024 based predictions on a pessimistic estimate for the nation’s total fertility rate of 0.84, but last year that rate was 0.69, 17 percent lower An expected National Development Council (NDC) report expects the nation’s population to drop below 12 million by 2065, with the old-age dependency ratio to top 100 percent sooner than 2070, sources said yesterday. The council is slated to release its latest population projections in August, using an ultra-low fertility model, the sources said. The previous report projected that Taiwan’s population would fall to 14.37 million by 2070, but based on a new estimate of the total fertility rate (TFR) — the average number of children born to a woman over her lifetime — the population is expected to reach 12 million by
RSS