Micah Garen, a US journalist who was investigating the looting of ancient artifacts in Iraq, was missing along with his Iraqi translator on Monday after the two were led at gunpoint last Friday from a shop in the southern city of Nasiriyah, according to news reports and the men's families.
Garen's family in New Haven said they had received information that he was still alive, but declined to release any further details, saying that his well-being required them to say as little as possible.
According to Associated Press Television News, a shopkeeper in Nasiriyah said in an interview on Monday that two armed men had entered his shop on Friday evening and led away Garen and his interpreter, Amir Doshe. A senior official in the city, Adnan al-Soirafy, quoting information given by the translator's family, confirmed that the two men had disappeared.
Garen, 36, a documentary filmmaker specializing in archeology, has spent much of the past year investigating the looting of ancient artifacts from sites near Nasiriyah that date to the Sumerian civilization, as long as 5,000 years ago. He told friends that his research for a film on the looting had uncovered gangs that have made a virtual industry of ransacking sites and exporting the looted treasures to antiquities markets across the world, and that he considered some of the gangs potentially dangerous.
The range of possible abductors also included insurgent groups that have virtually para-lyzed normal life in Nasiriyah, 370km south of Baghdad, in recent weeks. The most powerful of these is the Mahdi Army, the militia force loyal to cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, whose insurrection has reached at least eight cities across southern Iraq.
Garen's father, Alan Garen, e-mailed a brief statement on behalf of the family to the New York Times on Monday from New Haven, Connecticut, where he is a professor of molecular biophysics and biochemistry at Yale University.
The statement said his son "went to Iraq fully aware of the dangers, but determined to alert the world to the tragic loss of an irreplaceable archeological heritage."
But Garen's father, who offered no further explanation, appeared to leave open the possibility that the abductors could have been from the gangs of looters, or from other groups that felt threatened by his son's work.
"His remarkable intelligence, charm and thirst for understanding led him to seek information from all available sources," the statement said. "He refused to turn aside in the face of injustice and inhumanity even from those with the power and responsibility to provide protection, and he is now in mortal danger."
Garen has a reputation among other reporters for his intrepid style. During his investigation of the archeological looting, he has told friends about finding large networks of looters and smugglers and that there was evidence they had received protection from some Iraqi officials.
In recent weeks, he was working on a written account of his experiences that he had offered for publication in the New York Times.
He has frequently driven long distances to and from Baghdad, across territory that many reporters consider too dangerous because of frequent ambushes, bombings and other attacks by rebels.
He made one such journey on Friday, having lunch with friends in Baghdad before beginning the four-hour drive to Nasiriyah in what he expected to be a last, quick visit to complete his fieldwork on the documentary and the article for the Times.
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