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| Iraq |
| UAE diplomat freed in Iraq |
| 2006-05-31 |
| The captors of a United Arab Emirates diplomat held in Iraq for a fortnight have freed their hostage, an Emirati Foreign Ministry official confirmed yesterday. “Emirati diplomat, Naji Al Nuaimi, who was kidnapped in Iraq on May 16, was released this evening,” the official said. Nuaimi, a first secretary at the Baghdad Embassy, was seized while visiting the embassy’s cultural annex in the upmarket Mansur neighbourhood in an abduction in which a Sudanese guard was seriously wounded. A statement from a group calling itself Banner of Islam accompanied by footage of the hostage was broadcast by the Al Jazeera satellite news channel two days later. The kidnappers demanded that the UAE withdraw its ambassador from the Iraqi capital and shut down Al Fayhaa, a Dubai-based Iraqi television channel. The UAE recalled its charge d’affaires, its most senior diplomat in the Iraqi capital, the next day. The insurgents did not say why they wanted the Al Fayhaa channel closed, but the television channel often comes under attack on Sunni websites, which accuse it of being a mouthpiece of Iraq’s newly empowered Shiite majority. Nuaimi was the latest in a string of Arab diplomats to be kidnapped in Iraq, which has been hit by a rash of hostage-takings of foreigners, as well as Iraqis, since the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime three years ago. |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |