Italian reporter kidnapped in Iraq

Italian reporter kidnapped in Iraq

Dominic Timms
Friday February 4, 2005

MediaGuardian.co.uk

An Italian woman journalist has been kidnapped in Baghdad as she interviewed local people on the street.

Iraqi police sources said Giuliana Sgrena, a journalist on the Rome based Il Manifesto paper, was abducted outside Baghdad University.

She was conducting interviews near the university when four gunmen snatched her from her car at about 2pm, the Italian news agency ANSA said in a report after speaking to Sgrena's interpreter.

Two Iraqi journalists travelling with Sgrena were released after the gunmen stopped the car they were travelling in.

Italian Foreign Ministry officials said they were investigating the report, while Il Manifesto said Sgrena had been working for the paper in Iraq since January 23 and had called in just two hours earlier.

She is the second Italian journalist to be kidnapped in Iraq since the start of the war.

Last August Enzo Baldoni, an Italian freelance journalist working for Milan weekly Diario, was killed eight days after he went missing en route to Najaf, then the scene of heavy fighting between US troops and supporters of Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.

Sgrena's kidnapping comes a month after French reporter Florence Aubenas and her Iraqi assistant Hanoun Al-Saadi went missing in Baghdad.

Today international press freedom lobby group Reporters Sans Frontieres said that, though they could not rule out any other explanation for Aubenas's disappearance, "kidnapping with no political motive seems the most likely scenario at the moment".

Since US forces invaded the country, Iraq has become the most dangerous country in the world for journalists and media workers, journalist groups have said.

In a report earlier this year the International Federation of Journalists called on governments to do more to protect journalists after 129 media workers were killed last year, 69 of them in Iraq.