Zeid and Khazaal held hostage for past six months as three more journalists are killed

Reporters Without Borders called on the world today to keep up its campaign for the release of kidnapped Iraqi journalists Rim Zeid and Marwan Khazaal, of Sumariya TV, who have been held by kidnappers for more than six months, and said it was also worried about the fate of Salah Jali al-Gharrawi, a clerk at the Agence France-Presse (AFP) office in Bagdad, who was kidnapped four months ago. The international press freedom organisation meanwhile strongly condemned the fourth killing in a week yesterday of an Iraqi journalist in Baghdad, Mohammed Abbas Hamed, of the Iraqi paper Al Bayina Al Jadida, who was murdered in front of his home in western Baghdad after receiving threatening letters in recent weeks. The mother of the kidnapped Khazaal appealed through Reporters Without Borders to his captors to give news about her only son. Nothing has been heard of the three hostages since they were seized. The organisation started a petition in May calling for the release of all journalists held in Iraq, to be handed to prime minister Nuri al-Maliki urging him to take all necessary steps to find them. Zeid and Khazaal were seized by four armed men as they left a press conference on 1 February at the headquarters of the Islamic Party in Iraq in Yarmuk, western Baghdad. Al-Gharrawi was kidnapped by armed men in two unmarked cars with tinted windows as he left the AFP office on 4 April. Reporters Without Borders deplored the murder of Hamed, and also of Riyad Atto and Ismail Amin Ali, over the past week. It urged the authorities to do everything they could to ensure the safety of journalists and to set up an independent enquiry into the unsolved murders of journalists in Iraq over the past three years. It also called on armed groups to stop killing journalists. Police yesterday found the tortured body of Ali, who worked for several Iraqi papers, in the al-Bonuk neighbourhood of eastern Baghdad. The body of Atto, who was editor of the newspaper Talafar Al Yum, was found with gunshot wounds in a city morgue on 4 August. At least 103 journalists and media assistants have been killed and 48 kidnapped in Iraq since fighting began there in March 2003. Five of them (four Iraqis and Italian reporter Enzo Baldoni) were killed by their captors.