Trial to open in murder of Iraqi-British aid worker

BAGHDAD, June 5 (Reuters) Three suspects in the kidnap and murder of Iraqi-British aid worker Margaret Hassan in 2004 were going on trial in Baghdad today, a British official said.

Iraqi judicial officials were not immediately available for comment on what was believed to be one of the first, if not the very first, known trial for the abduction or killing of a foreign-born civilian in Iraq.

More than 200 foreigners and thousands of Iraqis have been kidnapped since US-led forces invaded Iraq in 2003 to topple Saddam Hussein. More than 40 of them have been killed, some of them beheaded.

The kidnappers are usually either politically motivated Islamic militants or criminal gangs seeking a ransom.

Hassan, an Iraqi-British national who had lived in Iraq for more than three decades after marrying an Iraqi engineer, was head of the Iraqi operation of the CARE International charity.

She was abducted while travelling to work in Baghdad in October 2004, and was killed about a month later after appealing in video messages made by her abductors for British forces to withdraw from Iraq. No group claimed responsibility for the abduction or the killing, and her body has not been found.

Her kidnapping came at the height of a wave of abductions of foreigners in Iraq, including two Italian aid workers, the British contractor Kenneth Bigley, who was also killed, and two American contractors working with him.

In May 2005, US and Iraqi forces arrested several people in a raid southeast of Baghdad believed to be linked to Hassan's murder.

Police said at the time that 11 people had been detained, and that five had admitted complicity in the killing.

Hassan, 59, was widely known in the aid community as a tireless worker for impoverished and marginalised Iraqis.

REUTERS KD ND1518