Release of journalist Raad Beraiej al-Azzawi

Journalist Raad Beraiej al-Azzawi of the newspaper Sada Wasit was released on 2 December 2004, after a ransom of $7,000 was paid to his kidnappers, according to US news agency Associated Press (AP). Armed men who had set up a roadblock on the road south of Baghdad abducted the journalist on 26 November. -------------------------------- 05.12.2004 Iraqi translator Bakhtiar Haddad released Kurdish-Iraqi translator Bakhtiar Haddad was released in the evening of 5 December 2004. He was arrested by US forces in Falluja on 8 November 2004, with the French photographer Corentin Fleury. His extended detention was reportedly due to the fact that he was seen in two shots carrying a weapon. -------------------------------- 29.11.2004 US army asked to justify continuing detention of Kurdish interpreter arrested in Fallujah Reporters Without Borders today called on the US military authorities to explain the continuing detention of Bakhtiar Haddad, an Iraqi interpreter of Kurdish origin who has been held for the past three weeks by US forces after being arrested in Fallujah on 8 November with French freelance photographer Corentin Fleury. US officials have said Haddad has been held in Abu Ghraib prison since 23 November on suspicion of collaborating with Iraqi guerrillas. "If the US forces have serious, well-founded reasons for keeping this news media employee in detention, they must produce the evidence," Reporters Without Borders said in a letter to Lt. Gen. John F. Sattler, the commander of the US marines in Fallujah. "Otherwise, they must release him immediately." Haddad was working for Fleury at the time of his arrest by US Marines in Fallujah. They had followed the US offensive on the centre of the Sunni rebel city together and, as part of their journalist work, they had met with Islamist guerrillas beginning on 24 October. When US and Iraqi troops launched their "final" assault on Fallujah on 8 November, Haddad and Fleury tried to leave the city by the north, crossing the railway line to reach the motorway. A report by Fleury in the 27 November issued of the magazine Le Monde 2 said they were arrested at about 7 p.m. by a group of US marines. "They detained us for five long days," he said. "After verifying everything, the Americans let me go, but they kept my interpreter." Two photographs taken by Fleury showing Haddad carrying a weapon are said to have prompted the US suspicions about him. A French-speaker, Haddad has worked with several teams of reporters covering the war in northern Iraq for French news media since early 2003. They include the TV stations France 2 and Canal +, and the privately-owned radio station RTL. The staff of these organisations have sent the US authorities in Iraq letters stressing his professional qualities as an interpreter and media assistant. After the fall of the Saddam regime, Haddad continued to work for foreign journalists. According to the Bakhtiar Haddad support committee, he is the son of a respected academic from the city of Erbil. "The Kurdish authorities are not aware of his having any Islamist past," the committee says. "More interested in football than politics, he witnessed the repression in Kurdistan after the first Gulf war, and has never expressed the least sympathy for Saddam Hussein's regime." An online petition for his release can be signed at www.freebakhtiar.org. Iraqi journalist kidnapped The Associated Press news agency has meanwhile reported that gunmen operating a fake checkpoint on a road south of Baghdad kidnapped Iraqi journalist Raad Beraiej Al-Azzawi of the Sada Wasit newspaper on 26 November. The newspaper's editor, Ayad al-Tamimi, said this took place about 40 km outside the city of Qut, which is 160 km south-west of Baghdad. Al-Azzawi called the newspaper and said no ransom was being demanded and that his abductors had detained him after finding his press card. He was a critic of the Saddam regime and was imprisoned when Saddam was in power.