Italy denies paying ransom despite official’s remark

ROME – Italy’s government dismissed reports Wednesday that it paid $1 million to free two Italian aid workers who were kidnapped in Iraq and held for three weeks before being released Tuesday.

Foreign Minister Franco Frattini attributed the release of Simona Pari and Simona Torretta to “all the good things Italy has done” in Iraq. But hours earlier, the head of parliament’s foreign affairs committee and a member of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia party said flatly that money “was paid.”

“It was right because the life of the two girls was more important than money,” lawmaker Gustavo Selva told reporters. “In principle, we shouldn’t give into blackmail, but this time we had to, although it’s a dangerous path. I think it was paid by the intelligence services.”

On a day when the two Italians were hailed as national heroes here and said they would like to return to Iraq, a British man still held captive in Iraq pleaded with Prime Minister Tony Blair to save his life.

A video posted on the Internet showed a chained and caged Kenneth Bigley, 62, saying: “Tony Blair, I am begging you for my life. Have some compassion. Only you can help me now.”

Bigley was shown making a similar plea last week after his kidnappers beheaded two Americans who were abducted with him. Accusing Blair on Wednesday of not taking any steps to secure his release, Bigley said between sobs that the British leader “doesn’t care about me. I am just one person.”

Speaking to reporters in the English seaside resort of Brighton at his political party’s annual conference, Blair said that “everything possible” was being done to free Bigley but that British authorities were not able to contact the kidnappers.

“We can’t make contact with them, and they have made no attempt to make contact with us,” he said. “If they made contact with us, it is something we would immediately respond to.”

Blair said he was “absolutely sickened” by Bigley’s ordeal.

Bigley’s family, meanwhile, responded with their own videotaped plea to the abductors. Bigley’s son Craig noted that his father was nearing retirement and was soon to be a grandfather and that Bigley’s 86-year-old mother had been hospitalized.

“We, as a family, feel that the ultimate decision to release him rests with you, the people who are holding him,” Craig Bigley said. “We once again ask you, please show mercy to my father and release him.”

More than 140 foreigners have been kidnapped in Iraq, apparently by a variety of groups that have issued a variety of demands. Some – like the group claiming to hold Bigley, known as Monotheism and Jihad – have sought concessions from the United States and other foreign countries that have troops or civilian workers in Iraq. Others have simply sought ransom payments.

Four Egyptian communications engineers were also released this week.

Orascom, parent company of the four Egyptians abducted last week, refused to say whether a ransom was paid for their release Monday and Tuesday. Two other Egyptian engineers are still held.

After Pari and Torretta, both 29, were abducted from their Baghdad offices along with two Iraqi humanitarian workers, Italians closely followed their fate, as alarming Internet messages carried threats to kill the pair if Italy did not withdraw its 2,700 troops from Iraq. But when a Kuwaiti newspaper, al-Rai al-Aam, reported this week that the women were alive and would be liberated, it said that the Italian government had secured their release by paying a ransom.

On Wednesday, the paper’s managing editor, Ali Roz, told Reuters news agency that the captors had originally demanded a $5 million ransom but settled for $1 million.

“A cleric mediated to get the amount of the ransom lowered,” Roz said.

In Rome, an unusually critical editorial in a newspaper funded by Berlusconi’s family took the government to task. Under the headline “Let’s Not Celebrate,” the editorial in Il Foglio said that paying a ransom would “fuel the arms trade and recruitment for the war against peace and democracy in that part of the world.”

The leftist opposition newspaper La Repubblica, a frequent critic of Berlusconi, praised the government for paying. “There’s nothing to be ashamed of,” a front-page commentary asserted.

Berlusconi has been cagey. “Controversy about the ransom? I don’t think there can be any,” he told reporters in Rome.

On Wednesday, Pari and Torretta made appearances in front of their homes and at the plaza in front of Rome’s city hall, which organized a brief concert.