Musharraf condemns hostage murders

Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf and the nation’s prime minister today condemned the murder of two Pakistanis kidnapped in Iraq.

The Pakistani leaders, in a strongly worded statement issued to the state-run news agency in the capital, Islamabad, said they had “received with the greatest distress and anguish the news of the reported murder of two Pakistanis”.

“Those who have committed this crime have caused the greatest harm both to humanity and Islam,” said the statement, issued on behalf of Musharraf and Prime Minister Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain.

Pakistani television showed the sisters and mother of one of the men, Raja Azad, wailing and beating their chests in anguish.

Geo television said they asked for their bodies to be retrieved and brought back to Pakistan so that they could be buried in keeping with Islam.

The family members had come to the capital, Islamabad, to press Pakistani officials for help in winning the men’s freedom, but they were reportedly heading back to their homes in Pakistan’s portion of Kashmir to grieve.

Musharraf and Hussain reiterated Pakistan’s commitment to the security and independence of Iraq.

The reaction came shortly after an Iraqi militant group claimed it had killed two Pakistani hostages but freed their Iraqi driver, according to Al-Jazeera television.

Azad, 49, an engineer and driver Sajad Naeem, 29, went missing on Friday after a convoy of vehicles was attacked by insurgents. Both were working in Iraq for the Kuwait-based al-Tamimi group.

The insurgents, who call themselves the Islamic Army in Iraq, announced in a video on Monday that it had kidnapped the men and sentenced them to death because their country was discussing sending troops to Iraq.

In a new videotape sent to Al-Jazeera, the group said it had carried out their threat, the Arabic-language satellite station reported.

The newsreader said the video showed the corpses of the two men, but the station declined to show the footage.

Pakistani Foreign Ministry spokesman Masood Khan termed the killings the “murder of humanity”.

Musharraf and Hussain had earlier appealed for the hostages’ release, saying they were poor men trying to support their families.

Pakistan, an Islamic nation of 150 million people and a member of the UN Security Council, has been a key ally of the United States in its war on terror in Afghanistan, but the country’s leadership has been less supportive of the US role in Iraq.

The nation has so far declined to send peacekeeping troops, though a senior Pakistani diplomat has taken up duties as special envoy in Iraq for UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan and will be overseeing peacekeeping operations.