http://www.smh.com.au/news/World/Kidnappers-extend-govts-deadlines/2005/05/15/1116095855477.htmlAustralia’s top Islamic leader says that kidnappers holding an Australian hostage in Iraq have indefinitely extended their deadline for Australian forces to start withdrawing from Iraq.
Sheik Taj Aldin Alhilali flew to Baghdad last week to try to negotiate the release of Douglas Wood, an Australian engineer captured more than a week ago.
Alhilali said the extension was granted after days of intensive talks with an influential association of clerics believed to have links with the insurgency and other Sunni Arab leaders.
“We have done all we can from our side and found full cooperation from the Association of Muslim Scholars. We also met with leaders of the Iraqi Islamic Party as well as popular personalities and tribal leaders,” Alhilali told Associated Press Television News.
“We have found positive response from everyone and we can say that this hard work in the past two or three days has led to extending the deadline. It has been extended indefinitely in order for talks to continue,” he said.
Wood’s kidnappers have called on Australia to remove its troops from Iraq, a demand the government has refused to meet.
Alhilali said he sent several messages to Mr Wood’s abductors telling them that “we are part of the Australian people and we have nothing to do with the government’s decision.”
He did not say how the messages were sent.
Speaking on the Ten Network, Prime Minister John Howard said, “everybody is working hard, including Sheik Alhilali, to secure Douglas Wood’s release, but I can’t independently tell the Australian people that we have evidence that the deadline is being extended indefinitely or that some new conditions are going to be set.”
More than 200 foreigners have been kidnapped in Iraq since Saddam Hussein’s regime collapsed in April 2003.
More than 30 have been killed by their captors.
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Searching For The Judas Who Betrayed Wood
By Paul McGeough, Chief Herald Correspondent in Baghdadhttp://www.smh.com.au/news/World/Searching-for-the-Judas-who-betrayed-Wood/2005/05/15/1116095858135.htmlAs Douglas Wood enters his third week as a hostage in Iraq, it has emerged that he was abducted from a construction site in Baghdad city centre, apparently unaware that a business meeting to which he had been invited may have been a sham.Australian investigators in the Iraqi capital are yet to discount a theory that the 63-year-old engineer was betrayed by his Iraqi driver or a local engineer who worked with him – both of whom are also thought to have been abducted.
A frustrating mercy mission to Baghdad by the Australian Mufti, Sheik Taj el-Din al Hilaly, is likely to end today, after he raised false hopes at the weekend that Mr Wood was alive and that contact had been made with the Shura Council of the Mujahideen in Iraq, which claims to be holding him.
At the Babylon Hotel, Sheik Hilaly told the Herald yesterday he had no information to confirm that Mr Wood was dead or alive and there had been no response from the kidnappers – or by anyone on their behalf – to messages he had disseminated through the Iraqi media.
Late last night Sydney time the mufti’s companion, Qusai Abdul Aziz, said: “We are still waiting for a call. The people we are talking to have said maybe we will receive one it will make us very happy because we want to leave.'”
Weekend reports in Australia quoted the Sheik as claiming he had received assurances that Mr Wood was alive; that the deadline by which Australia had to respond to his abductors’ demand for an Australian withdrawal from Iraq had been extended indefinitely; and that conditions for the safe release of Mr Wood should be revealed by today.
Yesterday the Al-Jazeera TV station was still reporting the sheik’s mistaken claims to its Arab-language audience in the region as a new development.
Mr Wood had been working for an Iraqi businessman, restoring commercial premises opposite the Agriculture Ministry on Al-Nasser Square. It was trashed earlier this year when suicide bombers targeted the nearby Hotel Sadeer, where staff of the US-owned private security firm DynaCorp had lodgings.
It was from that building that Mr Wood joined a group of Iraqis on April 29 to go to what he understood was a business meeting that had good prospects for him, sources familiar with aspects of the investigation told the Herald.
One of them said: “Doug was led down the stairs by whoever the Judas was to meet his captors. He got into the car thinking he was with friends. There is no provable information on the bona fides of the driver and engineer – but they are believed to have been abducted with Wood.”
The alarm over Mr Wood’s disappearance was not raised until about 24 hours after he went to the meeting. His driver’s car was found where it had been parked on Nasser Square, giving rise to the belief that the Wood party had willingly got into the abductors’ vehicle.
But claims by Iraqi sources that on Saturday the driver had been seen near a petrol station on Karada Street, in inner suburban Erketha, are the basis for speculation that the driver, and possibly the engineer, were complicit in Mr Wood’s abduction.
Despite much attention on Mr Wood’s plight in the Iraqi media, the families of the driver and the engineer are not known to have reported the men as missing.
The weekend reports in Australia quoted Sheik Hilaly’s former translator, Keysar Trad, who was speaking on behalf of the mufti, as saying: “While I am told the conditions for his release are likely to be strict, I am led to believe they will arrive in one or two days’ time.”
But despite unconfirmed reports that an Iraqi TV station had received a letter from the insurgents extending the deadline, there has been no known communication from them since they released a chilling DVD 10 days ago.
The DVD, in which Mr Wood could be heard pleading “Get out of Iraq or I’ll die”, set a 72-hour deadline for the Australian Government to pull its troops out of Iraq. It expired early last Tuesday.
The mufti’s comments prompted new hope by the Prime Minister, John Howard, who told Channel 10: “