Sudanese hostage’s mother appeals to captors, says poverty drove son to Iraq

KHARTOUM, Nov 1 (AFP) — The mother of a Sudanese hostage in Iraq appealed to his captors on Monday, saying her son only worked for US-led troops to feed his family, originally from Sudan’s conflict-ridden Darfur region.

A video image aired by Arabic satellite channel Al Arabiya October 30, 2004 shows two masked men pointing rifles at a Sudanese translator, named as Noureddin Zakaria, taken hostage in the Iraqi rebel town of Ramadi by an Iraqi resistance group. (Al Arabiya via Reuters).

“If you believe in Allah and the Prophet, I appeal to you not to bereave me of my only son, on whom I depend after the death of his father several years ago,” Amnah Idriss Mussa, 65, told the official Al-Rai Al-Aam newspaper.

She said her son Nureddin Zakaria worked with “the Americans not because he liked them but because he wanted to make a living for me.”

A video broadcast by Al-Arabyia television Saturday showed Zakaria being held by armed men claiming to belong to the “Thawrat al-Ishrin (Revolution of the 1920s) Brigade.”

He asked his employers to leave the country to secure his release.

The hostage’s elderly mother said her son, who had been living in Jordan and moved to Iraq four months ago, had called from the restive city of Ramadi in western Iraq a week ago to say he had found a job.

The newspaper quoted Hassan Jad Kerim, the chairman of a foreign ministry committee set up to follow Zakaria’s fate, as saying his family was originally from Kutum, in the western Darfur region which has been been plagued by a deadly civil war and one of the world’s worst humanitarian disasters.

Kerim said Zakaria had moved to Iraq to work as a translator for a US company called Tyson and added that he had not registered at the Sudanese embassy in Baghdad.

The committee is presently engaged in contacts with the US State Department and with the hostage’s employers to seek a rapid release, he said.