CARE Official Abducted in Iraq Presumed Dead

The husband of British-Iraqi aid worker Margaret Hassan said on Tuesday that his wife may have been killed by hostage-takers, citing a video tape that had surfaced. (Reuters)

There was anger in Iraq over the abduction. Iraqis on crutches and in wheelchairs gathered at a protest in Baghdad. The Association of Muslim Scholars, an organization of Sunni clerics that vocally supports the insurgency, issued a declaration that the aid worker was not a legitimate target.

At first, the protests appeared to have an effect. Her captors passed along word that they did not want to kill Hassan, but were holding her in an effort to embarrass the British government, the Bush administration's most prominent ally in the war.

But there was conflicting information about her status. On Nov. 2, al-Jazeera reported that the kidnappers had threatened to turn Hassan over to the group headed by Abu Musab Zarqawi, a Jordanian extremist who boasted of beheading other foreign hostages. Three days later, a message posted on the Internet by Zarqawi's group criticized her abduction, urging her release.

Al-Jazeera received the latest video at about the same time a woman's mutilated body was found on a street in Fallujah. The body remains unidentified.

Hassan's four brothers and sisters said that her "love of the Arab people started in the 1960s when she worked in Palestinian camps, living with the poorest of the poor and supporting the refugees."

"Our hearts are broken," Hassan's family said in a statement after al-Jazeera reported receiving the video. "We have kept hoping for as long as we could, but we now have to accept that Margaret has probably gone and at last her suffering has ended.

"Nobody can justify this," the statement by Hassan's family concluded. "Margaret was against sanctions and the war. To commit such a crime against anyone is unforgivable."

Special correspondent Naseer Nouri contributed to this report.