A hunt is under way for a British journalist and his Iraqi interpreter who were kidnapped at gunpoint from a hotel in Basra at the weekend.
The two men, who were working for the American network CBS, were seized in the early hours of Sunday morning from the Qasr al-Sultan Hotel in the centre of the city by a gang of five to ten men.
The kidnapping came as Iraqi police today said they had found the tortured and bullet-ridden body of an Iraqi journalist who went missing on Sunday in Baghdad.
Hisham Michwit Hamdan, aged 34, is the 270th Iraqi reporter to have been killed in the country since the 2003 invasion, according to the Iraqi Journalists’ Syndicate.
“We condemn these criminal acts and we are asking the Government to provide better security for our journalists who are trying their best to reflect the real picture of this country,” said Muyad al-Lami, General Secretary of the Syndicate.
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Mr Hamdan, a married father-of-two, was last seen going to a book market in central Baghdad on Sunday to buy stationary for the Young Journalists’ League.
Police eventually found his corpse in an eastern district of the city.
Hider Hassoun al-Fiza’a, head of the League, said: “He had been tortured and shot many times in the chest and head ? His murder is a big loss for all Iraqi journalists.”
Iraqi and Western reporters have become kidnap and murder targets for criminal gangs and politically-motivated insurgents over the past five years.
In the latest abduction, the Iraqi security services in Basra were busy searching for the British reporter and his interpreter, said an Interior Ministry spokesman.
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“These are journalists doing their job and those common criminals must be brought to justice,” Major General Abdul Karim Khalaf said.
Jawad al-Bolani, the Interior Minister, was supervising the search operation. “[He] ordered the formation of a high-level committee to investigate the incident and instructed all security facilities down in Basra to move immediately and use all possible means to save the journalist’s life,” Major General Khalaf added.
All was quiet at the hotel this afternoon, however, with no obvious sign of police activity outside the building, where guests were able to come and go as normal.
A hotel source said that the kidnappers entered quietly at about 2.30am on Sunday. Dressed in civilian clothes, they politely told the receptionist that they worked for the police. “They asked what room the Western man was in,” the source said.
One of the kidnappers ordered the other four to go upstairs to the room. He then followed. The two victims were led quietly outside and driven away. “The whole operation took about ten minutes,” the source said.
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Police officers in charge of security at hotels often dress in civilian clothes so the gang did not arouse suspicion with their attire. “We all believed that they were genuine police,” the source added.
Other witnesses said that the gang numbered ten, with one version of events suggesting that the men had visited the hotel earlier in the day to request a list of guests. Returning later, armed and masked, they stormed the building before leading out the journalist and his interpreter. The two hostages had only checked in the previous day.
The kidnapped Briton is a photojournalist with experience of covering conflicts around the world. He was one of only a few freelance photographers in Baghdad to record its fall in early 2003.
He has worked for publications including The Sunday Telegraph, The New York Times and The Financial Times.
Speaking today, his wife said: “It is still early days. We are just praying for him to be safe.”
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A CBS News spokeswoman confirmed that the broadcaster was attempting to locate two of its staff but would not confirm their identities. “All efforts are under way to find them and until we learn more details, CBS News requests that others do not speculate on the identities of those involved,” the spokeswoman said.
The Foreign Office in London said that it was investigating. A spokeswoman said: “We are aware of reports of a Western national missing in Basra and we are urgently looking into it.”
The kidnappings were condemned by the radical Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr’s organisation. “We ask the abductors to release the journalists,” the group’s Basra office said in a statement.
The Association of Iraqi Journalists also denounced the abductions and called on the kidnappers to release the two men, while the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists expressed dismay at the news.
“Iraq is the most dangerous country in the world for journalists and the deadliest conflict for the press in recent history,” said Joel Simon, the committee’s executive director. “Journalists face incalculable risks in order to bring us the news about what is happening on the ground there.”
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Reporters Without Borders, the Paris-based media watchdog, says the number of Iraqi and foreign journalists and media assistants to be killed in Iraq since the invasion is at least 208 – a lower toll than the Iraqi Journalist Syndicate’s figure. Most have been Iraqis killed by militants angered by their coverage or ideologically opposed to their employers. Others have died when caught in crossfire.
Some Westerners have been abducted and later released, among them Jill Carroll, a US freelancer who was kidnapped in January 2006, Florence Aubenas, a French journalist who was taken in January 2005, and Giuliana Sgrena, an Italian reporter abducted in February 2005.
British forces handed over security control of Basra to Iraqi authorities in mid-December and are now based at the city’s airport.