Home > Three Italians held by insurgents in Iraq and a Pole freed in raid on hideout
Three Italians held by insurgents in Iraq and a Pole freed in raid on hideout
by Open-Publishing - Wednesday 9 June 2004Four hostages freed in raid on hideout
Successful operation overshadowed by at least 15 deaths after car bombs go off
John Hooper in Rome and Michael Howard in Baghdad
The Guardian
Three Italians held by insurgents in Iraq for the past two months and a Pole snatched last week were rescued yesterday during a raid by coalition special forces.
The Italians were abducted in April along with a colleague, who was shot in the head while in captivity.
Videos of their ordeal - and the killing - had been circulated by the kidnappers, who had threatened to shoot other hostages if the Italian people did not protest against their country’s involvement with coalition forces in Iraq.
Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, the US regional commander, said yesterday that some of the alleged kidnappers had been seized during the raid, but there were no reports of shots being fired.
"The hostages are under coalition forces’ control and are in good health," Gen Sanchez said.
The Polish news agency, PAP, said that Jerzy Kos, the Pole, had been freed in Ramadi, 110 kilometres west of Baghdad. PAP quoted a spokesman for the company for which Mr Kos works as saying that he had been kept underground and was being treated at the Polish embassy in Baghdad for lesions "like dog bites" on his legs.
The abductions were part of a wave of kidnappings of foreigners sparked by intense violence that began in April. Up to 40 people from several nations were abducted, though most were later freed.
Italy’s prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, said he had given the go-ahead for special forces to storm the hideout in which the hostages were being held after being assured the operation could be carried out bloodlessly.
According to a report from Warsaw quoting a Polish officer, General Mieczyslav Bieniek, the team that freed the hostages was made up of American and Polish special forces. Italy’s defence minister, Antonio Martino, said the Italian military intelligence services, Sismi, had made a "fundamental contribution" to the operation.
News of the rescue was greeted in Italy with a mixture of relief, jubilation and renewed expressions of sympathy for the relatives of the fourth captive, Fabrizio Quattrocchi, who was murdered.
Mr Quattrocchi, a security guard like the other hostages, became a national hero when it emerged that his last words were: "Now I’m going to show you how an Italian dies."
One effect of their release of the three other men - Salvatore Stefio, Umberto Cupertino and Maurizio Agliana - will be to send Mr Berlusconi into a crucial test of popular opinion on a wave of national rejoicing. Sunday’s European and local elections are seen as an important measure of his ability to fend off the challenge posed by Romano Prodi, the president of the European commission and unofficial leader of the main anti-Berlusconi alliance.
For Carlo Agliana, Maurizio Agliana’s father, it will mean an end to an extraordinary pretence. By disconnecting the television, he succeeded in keeping his seriously ill wife from learning of her son’s ordeal for almost two months.
"When my wife looked at me, I saw she was trying to scrutinise me, to work out if something had happened," he told reporters yesterday.
The hostage rescue came on another bloody day in Iraq, with at least 15 people killed and dozens more injured as car bombs rocked two cities in northern Iraq.
In Mosul, Iraq’s third largest city and a Sunni Arab stronghold, a suspected suicide bomber killed nine civilians and injured at least 25 in an explosion near the mayor’s office during rush hour.
Earlier, a car bomb in front of a US base in Baquba, 30 miles north of Baghdad, killed at least five people, including a US soldier, standing at a checkpoint outside the base.
Hospital sources said last night that 11 Iraqis, including women and children, were killed in clashes between US forces and insurgents near Falluja.
Witnesses said heavy clashes broke out in Karma after rebels attacked a US military convoy using mortars, rocket-propelled grenades and automatic weapons.