World

Kin: Beheaded Body Was American

September 22, 2004 / 3:30 PM EDT / CBS/AP

The family of U.S. hostage Jack Hensley confirmed that the beheaded body found in Iraq is his, a day after a militant group claimed to have beheaded him — the second American captive executed this week.

The family was told the news Wednesday, the day Hensley would have turned 49, Cobb County Police spokesman Robert Quigley said outside Hensley's Marietta, Ga. home.

The body was handed over to American authorities in Baghdad, the U.S. Embassy said.

The militants have threatened to kill a British captive unless Muslim women in U.S. custody in Iraq are freed.

Iraqi officials earlier Wednesday said they planned to release one of the only two women they have — Rihab Rashid Taha, a scientist who became known as "Dr. Germ" for helping Iraq make weapons out of anthrax, and Huda Salih Mahdi Ammash, a biotech researcher known as "Mrs. Anthrax." Officials denied the decision was linked to demands by militants.

But the U.S. Embassy later said the two female scientists "are in our legal and physical custody" and that while "legal status of these two and many others is under constant review," no release is imminent.

And Interim Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi said his government is not negotiating with militants and that no release of detainees was imminent.

In other developments:

A U.S. Army soldier was killed on Wednesday when he stepped out of his vehicle to investigate a roadside bomb and it exploded, said Maj. Neal O'Brien, spokesman for the Army's 1st Infantry Division. At least 1,034 U.S. service members have been killed in Iraq.

The U.S. military charged two U.S. soldiers for the deaths of three Iraqis, the U.S. command said Wednesday.

A car bomb killed six people and injured 54 others in Baghdad near where Iraqi National Guard applicants were gathered.

U.S. and Iraqi forces clashed with rebels loyal to radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr in Baghdad's Sadr City. Ten people were reported killed.

Turkey's transportation minister urged Turkish truckers to use routes through Syria for shipments to Iraq following a surge of kidnappings and attacks targeting Turkish drivers.

Five unidentified bodies were found in a communal grave in an area west of Baghdad, residents said.

Iraq's top Shiite Muslim cleric — Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani — criticized a raid on al-Sadr's office, charging that it violated a peace deal reached last month.

The spiritual leader of the most active insurgency group in Iraq, Tawhid and Jihad, has been reported killed in a U.S. airstrike.

Portugal said it might make a new contribution to building up Iraq's security forces, an exception to a generally muted international response to President Bush's defense of the Iraq war and an appeal for help in rebuilding the country.

NATO envoys fine-tuned a draft plan to set up an alliance training center for Iraqi army officers and appeared to overcome French reservations that have held up agreement for a week.

The body believed to be Hensley's was found with its severed head in a black plastic bag in Baghdad's Amiriya neighborhood, said Col. Adnan Abdul-Rahman, an official with the Interior Ministry. The U.S. Embassy confirmed that a headless body was handed over to American authorities, but said officials were still trying to determine the identity of the corpse.

The announcement came after Tawhid and Jihad, an al Qaeda-linked group led by terror mastermind Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, claimed Tuesday to have killed Hensley, saying their demands for the release of Muslim women had not been met.

Ty Hensley, the hostage's brother, that "his reason for going was he wanted to make some money for his family, just to keep the bills paid."

Jack Hensley worked to rebuild a museum, for an oil company, on the water and electrical grids. Asked if his brother was aware of the danger in Iraq, Ty Hensely said, "He was."

On Monday, the group released gruesome footage of the beheading of fellow American hostage Eugene Armstrong. His body was discovered Monday just blocks from where he lived, western officials and witnesses said, raising the possibility that the hostages never left Baghdad.

"The nation's zealous sons slaughtered the second American hostage after the end of the deadline," the statement said. It was posted on an Islamic Web site and could not immediately be verified.

Late Tuesday, an expanded version of the statement announcing Hensley's death appeared on a different Islamic Web site and warned that the British hostage, Kenneth Bigley, 62, would be the next to die unless all Iraqi women are released from two U.S.-controlled prisons, Abu Ghraib and Umm Qasr.

Bigley's brother recorded a message to be broadcast on Arabic language TV station Al-Jazeera urging his captors to free him in response to the expected release of the Iraqi woman.

"Hopefully they will pick this up on the media and show that they have a gram of decency in them by releasing Ken," said Paul Bigley.

Hensley, Armstrong and Bigley were kidnapped last Thursday from a house that the three civil engineers shared in an upscale Baghdad neighborhood.

Tawhid and Jihad — Arabic for "Monotheism and Holy War" — has claimed responsibility for killing at least seven hostages, including another American, Nicholas Berg. The group has also said it is behind a number of bombings and gun attacks.

Recent violence in Iraq has seen Sunni and Shiite clerics gunned down, Christian churches bombed, hundreds of police killed and Iraqi soldiers abducted and threatened with death.

A classified report by the National Intelligence Council presented Mr. Bush this summer with several bleak scenarios, one of them envisioning civil war before the end of 2005.

The spiraling violence in Iraq has also raised doubts about whether elections can be held as planned in January.

"We are trying as best we can to support security and stability," Sen. Goerge Allen, R-Va., told the Early Show. "We're trying to get the United Nations and other countries in the United Nations to help out, but the march toward elections must go forward."