BAGHDAD, Iraq – TV pictures on Saturday showed Iraqi insurgents holding a foreigner, apparently American, prisoner in a car after fighting outside Baghdad the day before, the latest in a rash of kidnappings of foreigners in Iraq (search) during this week's violence.
The prisoner, who spoke with a southern American accent and was apparently wounded in the arm, spoke to a cameraman from the back seat of a car with a masked gunman next to him, on the main highway on Baghdad's western edge where fighting took place Friday.
The videotape apparently was shot Friday. The prisoner identified himself as Thomas Hamill to the cameraman, from Australia's ABC television (search), and said he was part of a convoy that was attacked.
When asked by an ABC reporter what happened, the man said: "They attacked our convoy. That's all I'm going to say."
The car then drove off down the highway with him still in the back seat, passing a burning tanker truck on the road. The prisoner wore what appeared to be a light flak jacket of the sort worn by private security guards, who are often contracted to protect convoys.
Gunmen attacked a fuel convoy Friday in Abu Ghreib (search) on the main highway outside Baghdad, setting a tanker on fire and killing one U.S. soldier and an Iraqi driver.
Insurgents elsewhere in Iraq have kidnapped three Japanese, a Canadian and an Arab from Jerusalem. Those holding the Japanese have threatened to kill them unless Tokyo withdraws its troops from Iraq by Sunday, a demand Japan's prime minister has refused.
A British citizen and two German security officials from their country's embassy in Baghdad are also missing, though it is not known if they have been kidnapped.
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