Russia's Foreign Ministry called Wednesday on the kidnappers of
four Russian Embassy staffers in Iraq to spare their lives after an
al-Qaida-led insurgent group said in a web statement it had decided
to kill them.
"We once again strongly urge not to take an irreparable step and
preserve the lives of our people," Foreign Ministry spokesman
Mikhail Kamynin said in a statement.
The ministry spokesman said that the four kidnapped Russian
Embassy personnel were representatives of a country "which has
never and nowhere waged a war against Islam." One of them is a
Muslim, he said.
The Mujahedeen Shura Council said Moscow failed to meet its
demands for a full withdrawal of troops from the war-torn region of
Chechnya and that a 48-hour deadline set in a statement issued on
Monday had run out.
"Therefore, the Islamic court of the Mujahedeen Shura Council
decided to implement God's law sentencing them (the four Russians)
to death," the group said in a statement on an Islamic militant
website where it often posts its statements.
The Shura Council is a grouping of seven Iraqi insurgent groups,
most prominent among them al-Qaida in Iraq, which on Tuesday
claimed responsibility for the slaying of two kidnapped US
soldiers.
The statement did not state that the Russians were killed. The
four embassy workers were abducted on June 3 in an attack on their
car near the Russian Embassy building in Baghdad in which a fifth
Russian was killed. The authenticity of the statement could not be
confirmed Wednesday.
(China Daily June 22, 2006)
