Kidnapped aid worker backs PM over 'no deal' stance

A Japanese woman kidnapped by Iraqi militants last month said she backed Tokyo’s rejection of her captors’ demands that it withdraw its troops from Iraq or see her burned alive.

In her first public remarks about her week-long ordeal, volunteer aid worker Nahoko Takato said she was terrified of being killed by the gunmen who took her and two compatriots hostage at an Iraqi petrol station on April 7.

The rebels said they would burn the three alive unless Japan pulled its military out of Iraq. Prime minister Junichiro Koizumi refused, saying he would not bow to terrorist demands.

The three were released a week later through the intervention of Muslim clerics.

“I think it was natural that they didn’t withdraw the Self-Defence Forces (Japan’s military),” Takato said in an interview with the Japanese press reported by Kyodo News Agency.

She added she had been well aware of the risks of going to Iraq.

“I prepared myself for that fact that I could die at any time,” Takato said. “I acted after having reflected carefully.”

Returning home to Japan, the three found themselves the target of intense criticism as the media and government officials slammed them for ignoring official travel warnings and for not taking enough safety precautions.

Relatives of the three were also widely criticised for publicly urging Koizumi to accept the kidnappers’ demands.

Takato, 34, did not directly rebut the criticism, saying only: “I think it is natural that there are many opinions.” She said, however, that she believed her aid work was more important than ever.

Takato said she continued to think of the situation in Iraq every day and harboured no ill feeling towards Iraqis.

In a grim video aired repeatedly on Japanese television, the kidnappers manhandled the three at gunpoint and pointed knives at their throats. Takato said she tried to tell the gunmen she was in Iraq to help their country so they would spare her, the photojournalist and the other aid worker.

Japan has maintained its deployment of about 550 Japanese soldiers in the south-eastern Iraq city of Samawah carrying out non-combat, humanitarian projects. It is this country’s largest military mission since the Second World War ended in 1945.

Two other Japanese people taken hostage in a separate incident last month were also released unharmed.