The United States unsuccessfully tried at least twice to rescue two Americans and one British man taken hostage in Iraq last month and later beheaded, U.S. officials said on Tuesday. The officials, who asked not to be identified, said hostage rescue teams went to two places in Baghdad based on intelligence reports and found nothing. "They just got there and nobody was there," one official said of the attempts to free Americans Eugene Armstrong and Jack Hensley and Briton Ken Bigley, who were taken on Sept. 16 from their home in Baghdad. | I think I heard on the radio that the beds were still warm when US forces arrived. Mahmoud the Weasel (TM) strikes again... |
CNN, which first reported the attempts from Baghdad on Tuesday, said they involved both U.S. military and other government personnel. But the officials in Washington declined to discuss any details. They confirmed that one attempt was made when all three men were still alive and that the second followed the killing of Armstrong just days after he was taken. "We don't really know whether the men were ever at the spots," one official told Reuters. "But there were attempts to get them." Armstrong was killed on Sept. 20 and Hensley a day later by a group headed by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, which demanded that Washington and Britain release women prisoners from jails in Iraq. Bigley, a 62-year-old engineer, was killed last week and a video tape posted on the Internet on Sunday showed him making a last appeal to Prime Minister Tony Blair to meet the demands of the militants holding him. |