BAGHDAD, Feb 18 (AFP) - Two Indonesian journalists have gone missing in Iraq while driving on a notoriously dangerous road from Amman to Baghdad, Indonesian officials said Friday.
"The two journalists, who work for an Indonesian television station, were coming to Baghdad by road and disappeared in the region of Ramadi," said a security source at the embassy.
Ramadi is an infamous rebel hotspot 100 kilometres (62 miles) west of Baghdad.
Earlier this month, Italian reporter Giuliana Sgrena, 56, who works for the leftist Il Manifesto daily, was seized after visiting a Baghdad mosque where refugees have been encamped since the devastating US-led assault on the city of Fallujah in November.
The area is one of notorious danger for journalists.
There has been no news of the fate of either journalist.
On February 9, Abdel Hussein Khazaal, 40, a correspondent with the US-funded Arab television station Al-Hurra, was gunned down with his four-year-old son in the city of Basra.
On Friday, the Indonesian foreign ministry in Jakarta said the two missing journalists, working for the private Metro TV station, were in a rented car in Ramadi on Tuesday when they were last heard of.
"We do not want to use the word kidnapped or that they have been held hostage at the moment," spokesman Marty Natalegawa told reporters in Jakarta, saying the two had been "intercepted".
"We've lost contact with them and we are trying to ascertain their whereabouts and conditions at the moment through our staff in Amman," Natalegawa said.
The two journalists, a man and a woman, did not tell the embassy in Baghdad that they were coming, otherwise "I would have told them to take the plane and not to come by road," said the Baghdad embassy source.
Metro TV head of news coverage Claudius Boekan told AFP in Jakarta: "I am hoping that they have not been abducted and that they only lost contact with us. We have no reason yet to be concerned that they may have been abducted."
In September two Indonesian women were kidnapped while travelling to Iraq from Jordan by the militant Islamic Army in Iraq, which has kidnapped a number of journalists in the country.
They were released after then Indonesian president Megawati Sukarnoputri made an appeal for the release broadcast on Arabic satellite television station Al-Jazeera.
The hostage-takers had demanded that Indonesia free radical Muslim cleric Abu Bakar Bashir, who was then awaiting trial for allegedly leading the Al-Qaeda-linked Jemaah Islamiyah group and blamed for several deadly bombings.
Indonesia, the world's largest Muslim country, was a vocal opponent of the US-led invasion of Iraq of March 2003.
In August, a 27-year-old Indonesian engineer working for a British contractor, Fahmi Ahmad, became the first Indonesian killed in Iraq since the 2003 invasion.
02/18/2005 13:25 GMT - AFP