British hostage pleads London to withdraw from Iraq as violence flares

BAGHDAD, Oct 22 (AFP) - Kidnapped British aid worker Margaret Hassan pleaded Friday for London to save her life by scrapping a plan to redeploy Britain's troops in Iraq and by pulling them out, as more than a dozen people died in clashes around the country.
"Please help me, please help me, these might be my last hours," a sobbing Hassan said on a tape broadcast by Arabic news channel Al-Jazeera.
"I will die like Mr (Kenneth) Bigley," the British hostage beheaded in Iraq earlier this month, she said.
"Ask Mr Blair to pull the (British) forces out of Iraq and not to bring them to Baghdad," she said, referring to Prime Minister Tony Blair who has agreed to Washington's request to redeploy troops from the south to US-controlled areas.
Britain said Thursday an 850-strong battle group would be posted outside Baghdad as part of the redeployment that will free up US troops for an expected assault on insurgents in the violence-plagued western city of Fallujah.
The international relief agency CARE, of which Hassan is local director, announced it was suspending operations in Iraq after her abduction Tuesday.
She holds dual British and Irish national who married an Iraqi and has lived in Iraq for the past 30 years, was kidnapped on her way to work Tuesday.
Bigley had been abducted in Baghdad in September by Zarqawi's Tawhid wal Jihad (Unity and Holy War) insurgent group along with two US colleagues who were also beheaded.
No group has claimed responsibility for Hassan's abduction.
On the ground, US and Iraqi forces clashed with insurgents Friday in the town of Buhruz, northeast of Baghdad near Baquba, after rebels attacked a US patrol with small arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades, said a military spokesman.
He said nine insurgents were killed three wounded in the fighting which lasted several hours.
A hospital in Baquba said it received three dead and eight wounded from the fighting.
Violence also flared in the northern city of Mosul when US and Iraqi forces tried to arrest what the military said were suspected insurgents holed up in the Thul-Nurain mosque.
Clashes wounded two US soldiers and one Iraqi. Another five soldiers were wounded when their convoy hit a roadside bomb as it was leaving the area.
Shortly after another car bomb went off nearby killing one Iraqi and wounding another.
In the rebel stronghold of Fallujah, US marines fired heavy artillery on insurgents who attacked them from inside the Sunni Muslim city west of the capital, the military said.
An AFP correspondent said he heard loud explosions and saw smoke and fire rising from the city's Al-Shuhada neighbourhood, where US warplanes bombed a suspected weapons depot on Thursday night.
Hospitals said seven people were killed during the assault.
Determined to regain control of the no-go zone ahead of January polls, more than 1,000 joint forces have encircled the city for the past week.
Prime Minister Iyad Allawi last week ordered Fallujah residents to surrender Al-Qaeda operative Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi, the head of Tawhid wal Jihad, or face invasion by US and Iraqi forces.
Elsewhere, preliminary court martial proceedings began for a US prison guard accused of physical and sexual abuse of Iraqi detainees in the Abu Ghraib jail scandal, while the murder trial of a second US soldier got underway Friday.
Specialist Charles Graner, who posed in a notorious photograph with naked Iraqi detainees stacked in a pyramid last autumn, sat clean shaven in court with his attorneys.
The preliminary hearing saw the judge, Colonel James Pohl, reject two requests from the defence and schedule the next court date for December 3 and the actual trial for January 7.
Pohl struck down a request to grant immunity to witnesses.
The hearing followed Thursday's sentencing of the most senior soldier charged so far in the case, Staff Sergeant Ivan Frederick, to eight years in prison. Graner's attorney painted a portrait of a low-ranking soldier simply following orders from top brass.
Macedonia, meanwhile, confirmed that at least two of its nationals held hostage in Iraq had been executed.
The Macedonian foreign ministry said the dead men had been identified from television footage as Zoran Nasovski and Dalibor Lazarevski, two of three Macedonian civilians missing in Iraq since August.
One of the two killed Macedonians had travelled to Iraq, along with his future father-in-law, to earn money for his wedding, according to reports in their home country.
In Turkey, the relieved mother of a hostage kidnapped in Iraq two weeks ago told how her son had managed to escape, apparently with the help of one of his captors.
A Turkish diplomat confirmed that 21-year-old welder Abdurrahman Yildirim was free and would be flown back home on Saturday at the latest.
In southern Iraq, three Danish soldiers were wounded when two roadside bombs exploded next to their vehicles in separate incidents, Danish military officials said.
Medical sources said another roadside bomb had killed four Iraqis overnight on a road in the Latifiyah area, south of Baghdad, that is the scene of frequent roadside bombings against convoys, kidnappings and killings.
In France, intelligence agents said they had identified the first French national known to have been killed fighting with the Iraqi insurgency.
The 19-year-old, named only as Redouane H, is believed to have travelled to Iraq via Syria at the start of the year and been killed in a US bombardment on Fallujah in July.

10/22/2004 19:19 GMT - AFP