Agence France Presse  --  Arab News

ANKARA, 30 June 2004 — Three Turkish hostages held in Iraq by an Al-Qaeda-linked extremist group were released yesterday, hours before their threatened beheading, in a welcome break for the new Iraqi government.

Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul confirmed the release, first announced in a statement from the hostage-takers carried by the Arabic television channel Al-Jazeera.

Gul thanked Turkish anti-NATO protesters who had appealed on Sunday for the release of the hostages during a peaceful demonstration to denounce the alliance’s two-day summit in Istanbul.

“Civic groups had appealed for the release of our citizens. I think this was very effective and I want to thank them,” Gul said.

“I hope such incidents will not be repeated. This development has made us very happy,” he told state television on the sidelines of the NATO summit in Istanbul.

The hostage-takers, a group led by the Jordanian Abu Mussab Al-Zarqawi, had threatened on Saturday, in a tape also broadcast on Al-Jazeera, to execute Abdulselam Bakir, Mehmet Bakir and Mustafa Bal within 72 hours if Turkish companies continued working for Americans in Iraq.

They also called for protests across Turkey against US President George W. Bush’s attendance at the NATO summit in Istanbul, which was to end yesterday.

Ankara had rejected the kidnappers’ demands, saying that it never gives in to threats by terrorists.

The group — the armed Tawhid wal Jihad (Unity and Holy War) — had already claimed responsibility for the recent beheadings of kidnapped American Nicholas Berg and South Korea’s Kim Sun-Il.

“In view of your honorable attitude ... we are freeing these hostages and releasing them after they pledged to no longer help the infidels,” a spokesman for the group said in a new videotape aired by Al-Jazeera.

Addressing “Muslims and Mujahedeen in Turkey,” the spokesman was referring to Sunday’s protests.

The father of one of the released hostages had appealed to the kidnappers earlier in the day to spare the lives of fellow Muslims.

“If they (the kidnappers) are Muslims, then Muslims do not kill Muslims. Muslims are brothers,” Hudai Bakir, the father of Abdulselam Bakir, told AFP by telephone from the village of Dover in southeastern Turkey.

“We are a neighboring country. Turkey has only been helping the Iraqis and I do not understand why they are threatening to kill them. We want our children to be released,” he added.

Abdulselam and Mehmet Bakir, aged 32 and 30 respectively, are cousins.

The three hostages were kidnapped in early June.

Another two Turkish workers — Murat Kizil and Soner Sercali — have also been held hostage in Iraq since early June by a different group thought to have kidnapped them only for ransom, a Turkish diplomat told AFP earlier.

They were able to phone their families over the weekend, and Kizil said they would soon be released, their fathers said.

Media reports on Monday had wrongly suggested it was one of those threatened with execution who had been allowed to phone.

The diplomat said everything was being done to try to win their release.

A wave of kidnappings has swept Iraq since April, when US forces launched an assault on Fallujah and radical Shiite Muslim cleric Moqtada Sadr mounted a revolt against the US-led coalition in central and southern Iraq.

Dozens of foreign nationals have since been taken hostage, some of them later released, others executed.