Cairo - Prominent Egyptian Islamist Sheikh Osama Mustafa
Hassan Nasr, known as Abu Omar al-Masri, called Sunday on Iraqi
militants holding two German citizens as hostages to let them go.
'I plead with you - for the sake of Allah - to immediately free
the two captives,' al-Masri told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa over the
phone, in a message to the militants.
Militants of a little-known group calling itself the brigade of
the Arrows of Righteousness are holding a German woman and her son
captives, and threatened Saturday to kill them unless Germany starts
withdrawing its troops from Afghanistan within 10 days.
The 61-year-old woman had made a tearful plea for help to German
Chancellor Angela Merkel in a video posted by the abductors on an
Islamist website.
Al-Masri, a former Imam of a mosque in Milan, said he saw the
video.
Al-Masri himself was reportedly kidnapped in Italy and then taken
to Cairo in 2004. He was released briefly and detained by Egyptian
authorities as a terrorist suspect, and was recently released.
'I am your brother in Allah - who was kidnapped from the streets
of Milan on 27 February 2003 by CIA agents, following campaigns where
I condemned the injustice of the US State Department towards the
Afghan and Iraqi people,' he said in his message to the militants.
Al-Masri, who in his own words spent 'four years in captivity,
(and) imprisonment,' urged the kidnappers not to kill the mother and
her son.
'What are the German mother and the son guilty of? What have they
got to do with the foreign policy of their country?' he said, adding
that Muslims in the west 'face troubles' and that killing the German
citizens will have an even more negative effects.
'Have mercy on your (Muslim) brothers and let go of the German
mother and her son,' he added.
Berlin-born Hannelore Marianne K. and her adult son were seized on
February 6 by armed men who burst into their family home in Baghdad.
She said her son was married and indicated his wife was pregnant.
'I'm asking you to help me,' she sobbed in the video broadcast.
'We're Germans as well. These people want to kill my son before my
eyes and then kill me. I don't want to die like this,' she said in
German.
The video had showed three masked men standing behind the woman,
who was wearing a loosely tied headdress and holding the hand of her
son crouching next to her.
© 2007 dpa - Deutsche Presse-Agentur 
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