Jihadis Mutilating Hostages
Charles Johnson
Wed Mar 12, 2008 at 6:33 pm PDT • Views: 339
An article that will make you sick and angry: Severed fingers of 5 hostages delivered to U.S. officials in Iraq.
BAGHDAD _U.S. authorities in Baghdad have received five severed fingers belonging to four Americans and an Austrian who were taken hostage more than a year ago in Iraq , U.S. officials said Wednesday.
The FBI is investigating the grisly development, and the families of the five kidnapped contractors have been notified, American officials said on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to discuss the case publicly.
Authorities confirmed that the fingers belonged to hostages Jonathon Cote , of Gainesville, Fla. ; Joshua Munns , of Redding, Calif. ; Paul Johnson Reuben , of Buffalo, Minn. ; Bert Nussbaumer of Vienna, Austria ; and Ronald J. Withrow , an American who was kidnapped separately from the others.
No information was available on when or how the fingers were delivered to U.S. authorities. Some relatives of the missing men said that they’d heard weeks ago that the DNA of the hostages had been obtained, but they’d been given no details.
The first four men were security contractors with Kuwait -based Crescent Security and were captured in a brazen ambush of their 43-truck supply convoy in the southern Iraqi town of Safwan, near the Kuwaiti border, on Nov. 16, 2006 .
Frank says: