SOFIA 7-9-04(Reuters) - Bulgaria vowed on Friday it would not change its policies after two of its nationals were taken hostage by militants in Iraq, and identified the pair as civilian truck drivers.
"Bulgaria is a stable state with a predictable foreign policy and we cannot expect it would change its foreign policy because of one or another group," Foreign Minister Solomon Passy told state radio.
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State radio said the foreign ministry had identified the two hostages as civilian truck drivers. Their captors threatened on Thursday to kill them in 24 hours unless U.S.-led forces freed prisoners, Arabic satellite television Al Jazeera reported. Passy said Bulgaria had contacted the U.S. government over the demand that the United States free imprisoned Iraqis, but gave no details.
Bulgarian state radio named the two hostages as Ivailo Kepov and Georgi Lazov and said they had left for Iraq on June 19. The foreign ministry had received no demand from the hostage-takers for a pullout of Bulgarian troops, it said. Bulgaria has 470 troops in the U.S.-led force in Iraq, based in the southern city of Kerbala.
Private television channel BTV said the two drivers, working for a Bulgarian company, had unloaded cars from their trucks in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul and had been on the return journey when they were taken hostage. The hostage-taking follows a previous incident three months ago, when a Bulgarian truck driver was killed in an attack on a column of six trucks on the road from Basra to Baghdad.
Al Jazeera said the video tape came from the Tawhid and Jihad Group headed by Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who has been accused by Washington of links to Osama bin Laden ’s al Qaeda.
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