Australian seized in Iraq

Militants issued a tape yesterday of an Australian taken hostage in Iraq, the latest victim of a kidnapping crisis that has seen more than 150 foreigners and several hundred Iraqis taken captive.

The tape came on the day US and Iraqi forces detained several men thought to be linked to the killing of a British hostage, aid worker Margaret Hassan, who was seized last year.

On the video released yesterday, a man identifying himself as Douglas Wood, a 63-year-old Australian who lives in California, appealed to the United States, Britain and Australia to pull their troops out of Iraq and spare his life.

"Please help me. I don't want to die," he says, sitting on the floor as two masked men armed with assault rifles and wearing bullet proof vests stand to either side of him.

The authenticity of the tape, which carries the banner of a previously identified group calling itself the Shura Council of the Mujahideen in Iraq, could not be verified.

Mr Wood, dressed in a short-sleeved black polo shirt, said he had worked in Iraq for more than a year and "has done many jobs with the American military". It is not clear what work he does.

A statement from the militants issued with the tape said it had been released to coincide with a visit to Iraq by Australian Defence Minister Robert Hill, who was in Baghdad yesterday.

"My captors are fiercely patriotic. They believe in a strong, united Iraq looking after its own destiny," Mr Wood said, his head slumped forward and his voice close to breaking.

"President Bush, Prime Minister Howard, (California) Governor Schwarzenegger, family, friends, please take the American troops, the Australian troops, the British troops out of here and let Iraq look after itself," he said, breaking down.

Mr Wood is the latest of around 150 foreigners to have been seized in Iraq over the past 18 months. Almost a third of those have been killed after the captors' demands were not met.

Over the same period, an estimated 5,000 Iraqis have also been kidnapped by criminal gangs looking to earn ransom.

The tape was released on the day a minor breakthrough appeared to have been made in one of the most high-profile kidnappings of the past year, the seizure of Margaret Hassan.

Iraqi police said 11 people had been detained in raids conducted with US troops south of Baghdad. Five of the detainees had admitted to complicity in her killing, they said.

Ms Hassan, a British national who headed CARE International in Iraq, was kidnapped last October. She was killed about a month later after appealing on video tapes for British forces to withdraw from Iraq. Her body was never found.

"We are aware that a raid was conducted and that items were recovered that we believe may belong to Margaret Hassan," a spokesman for the British embassy in Baghdad said.

"There is reasonable evidence to believe that the items were Hassan's... it seems likely. But until our police have finished their investigation we cannot say definitively."

Iraqi authorities said clothing, a bag and identification documents belonging to Ms Hassan had been found at the scene, but the embassy official declined to say what items were discovered.

The arrests came amid a surge in guerilla activity in the past three days - ever since Iraq formed its first democratically elected government in 50 years.

The political squabbling and renewed violence also appear to have fuelled sectarian tensions, with politicians struggling to balance the interests of Shi'ites and Kurds, who are the new powers, and the Sunnis who dominated Iraq under Saddam Hussein.