- Title: VARIOUS: U.S hostage Tom Fox is killed and body found in Baghdad, police said
- Date: 11th March 2006
- Summary: STREET SCENE
- Embargoed: 26th March 2006 13:00
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- Topics: Crime / Law Enforcement
- Reuters ID: LVAB4TRZWSJWJJMIYSY6ZTVQTULE
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- Story Text: American hostage Tom Fox has been killed and his body, showing signs of torture, left at a garbage dump in Baghdad, police said on Saturday (March 11).
One of the policemen who found the body said the 54-year-old peace activist, wearing a grey tracksuit, appeared to have beaten by electric cables before his death. He had a single gunshot wound to the head and his hands were tied behind him.
Members of the Christian Peace Team (CPT) in the West Bank city of Hebron gathered on Saturday (March 11) to protest the killing of their colleague Tom Fox in Iraq.
Wearing red CPT caps and carrying photos of colleagues, the peace activists mourned Fox's death and called on Iraqi insurgents to release hostages.
Fox worked for CPT in Hebron, mostly in accompanying Palestinian children who had to walk every day to school through roads reserved for passage of settlers and for farmers crossing army checkpoints on their way to harvest their fields.
One of Fox's colleague, Donna Hicks, described him as a man who pursued peace and who always sought for alternative ways to war.
"There is another way than violence and war. Tom stood for way of getting to know people that was non violent. He loved his friends, he loved his enemies, he reached out to the light and the humanity of everyone and that is very important," she told Reuters.
On Saturday, members of the Langley Hill Friends Meeting, a peace group in northern Virginia to which Fox belonged, read a statement he co-wrote in October 2004 in which he shunned violence, even to rescue him should he ever be kidnapped.
Fox, who had been in Iraq to campaign against the U.S. occupation and to work for the the release of Iraqis held by U.S. forces, was taken hostage with three colleagues in November by a group calling itself the "Swords of Truth".
The group had threatened to kill the four, members of the Chicago-based Christian Peacemaker Teams, unless U.S. forces and the Iraqi authorities freed all prisoners in their custody.
Kryss Chupp, a Christian Peacemaker Co-ordinator said: "I feel like we stand in a different way today as an organisation and as friends of Tom with those Iraqi families who have suffered this kind of loss on a daily basis for three years, and before."
A member of the police patrol which found Fox's body told Reuters it had been found on a garbage dump beside a railway line in the capital's western Mansour district on Thursday.
The policeman, who declined to be identified, said local people had covered the body with pieces of cardboard after reporting the discovery to police.
Iraqis on Saturday (March 11) expressed dismay at Fox's killing.
"As Iraqi people we totally reject all the justification given for the killing of those people who are here for purely humanitarian reasons. Therefore, we reject the killings of those people from a humanitarian point of view and as Muslim too we reject this heinous act," said Abu Hasaneen al-Qaissi.
More than 200 foreigners and thousands of Iraqis have been kidnapped since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion. Fifty-five foreign hostages are now known to have been killed by their captors. Two Germans and two Kenyans are among those still being held. - Copyright Holder: REUTERS
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