IRAQ:AL-ARABIYA television yesterday aired a video it said showed one of five Britons held in Iraq by a Shia Muslim group for some eight months.
"My name is Peter . . . I have been held here for nearly eight months now," a man said on the video. Arabiya said he called on British prime minister Gordon Brown to free nine Iraqis to gain the release of the five.
"It's as simple as that. It's a simple exchange of people . . . That's all they want. Just to have their people released and we can go home," he said. "I miss my family a lot and the only thing I want is to get out of here. I tell Gordon Brown, free their prisoners and we can go home."
The Britons, a computer instructor and his four bodyguards, were seized by gunmen from inside an Iraqi finance ministry building in Baghdad in May.
In a statement shown by the television station, a group calling itself the Shia Islamic Resistance in Iraq said: "We are addressing you the British people and not your government because your are keener than your government and your queen [for the release of the five]." The statement indicated that some or all of the nine were held by US forces.
Meanwhile, Iraq condemned Turkey's incursion into its northern territory, to attack Kurdish guerrillas, in the strongest terms so far and demanded an immediate end to what it called a violation of its sovereignty. Thousands of Turkish troops crossed the border last Thursday to engage PKK fighters who have used mountainous northern Iraq as a base for their struggle for self-rule in the mainly Kurdish southeast of Turkey since the 1990s.
"The cabinet expressed its rejection and condemnation for the Turkish military interference, which is considered a violation of Iraq's sovereignty," the Iraqi government said in a statement released by spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh. "The cabinet stresses that unilateral military action is not acceptable and threatens good relations between the two neighbours."
Mr Dabbagh said earlier yesterday that a Turkish envoy would meet Iraq's president Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, and government leaders in Baghdad today.
In the northern Iraqi city of Mosul yesterday a suicide bomber blew himself up inside a bus, killing at least eight people, as the vehicle stopped at a checkpoint. The US military accused the Sunni Islamist group of carrying out the bus bombing.
Brig-Gen Khalid Abdul-Sattar, Iraqi military operations spokesman in northern Nineveh province, said a bus heading to Syria from Kirkuk was stopped at a military checkpoint in the town of Kasik, 20km west of Mosul. "A soldier came on board the bus and the bomber tried to get off. The soldier pointed his gun at him and told him to sit down. At that point the bomber detonated his explosives," Gen Sattar said.