12 Hostages from Nepal Slain on Video
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

BAGHDAD, Iraq – Twelve Nepalese workers seized by terrorists in Iraq were executed on video yesterday in the biggest mass killing of hostages in the recent wave of abductions.
The men, kidnapped three weeks ago as they drove into the country from Jordan to work as cooks and cleaners, were said to have been murdered by the obscure Ansar al-Sunna Army. This fundamentalist group claimed responsibility last year for suicide bombings in the Kurdish city of Irbil that killed 109.
The victims claimed on the video that they had been duped into going to Iraq by unscrupulous brokers in Nepal, and had thought that their destination was Jordan.
The mass killing doubled the number of hostages executed in Iraq. It was particularly disturbing because of its extremely brutal manner, the peripheral role of the 17,000 or so poor Nepalese workers in Iraq, and the fact there were no demands beforehand.
In the video, the first victim is shown blindfolded and lying on his back on the ground. He is approached by a man wielding a knife. The words “God is great” are shouted and the victim’s throat is cut. The video records the terrible sound of him struggling to breathe. He is then decapitated and his head held aloft. It is placed on his torso. Another man is shown shooting the other 11 Nepalese.
At the end of the video, a voice vows to fight the Americans and the interim government in Baghdad and calls for the establishment of Islamic law in Iraq.
In a previous video, the Nepalese were shown gathered together as one of them, with an American flag draped over him, read a statement denouncing American policy in Iraq. Ansa al-Sunna is thought to be an amalgam of Kurdish members of an Al Qaeda linked group, Ansar al-Islam, which is comprised of Iranians and Syrians sympathetic to Osama bin Laden and Iraqi Sunni Muslims.
In Kathmandu, there were demands for a crackdown on recruitment firms blamed by the hostages for duping them.
“My brother went just to earn a living. He had nothing to do with the Americans. We are helpless against fanatics,” said the brother of one victim, Ramesh Khadka, 19.
[Separately, in another hostage crisis, French officials held talks in Paris and around the Arab world seeking to save the lives of journalists Christian Chesnot and Georges Malbrunot in the final hours before a deadline this morning set by kidnappers demanding that France rescind its ban on Muslim head scarves in French schools, the Associated Press reported.]