BERLIN,
August 20 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - The Iraqi charge
d'affaires Shamir Mohammed was among a number of hostages held in the
Iraqi embassy in Berlin Tuesday, August 20, 2002, according to a German
police spokesman.
He
is one of up to six people held in the building, by a little-known Iraqi
opposition group based in Germany.
Two
people were hurt after the group burst into the embassy, police said.
A
group of refugees called the Democratic Iraqi Opposition in Germany is
believed to be behind the hostage-taking in Baghdad's embassy in Berlin,
an Iraqi opposition official said Tuesday.
The
group was set up a few months ago among Iraqi political refugees living
in Germany, said an official with the main Iraqi opposition coalition,
the Iraqi National Congress (INC), according to Agence France-Presse
(AFP).
The
official, who asked not to be named, said the hostage-taking had nothing
to do with mainstream exiled Iraqi groups, AFP said.
"The
policy of the opposition is to fight the dictatorship inside Iraq and
not abroad and we are sticking by this policy," the official said
by telephone from London, the INC headquarters.
"We
have never had recourse to violence outside Iraq," he added.
In
Berlin, police said several people have been injured in the
hostage-taking at the Iraqi embassy.
Police
said some unidentified people stormed the building in the southwestern
district of Zehlendorf, leading to clashes with embassy staff.
Following
an emergency call from local residents, the German Police went to the
scene, according to BBC News Online.
Several
police vehicles surrounded the building, with a large police presence
witnesses said.
For
his part, an Arab political analyst, based in Germany, told IslamOnline
that the hostage taking situation in the Iraqi embassy in Berlin “is a
message [directed] to the Germen government, not the Iraqi one.”
Nabil
Shabeeb added that “the center of the Iraqi opposition is in London or
Washington, not Berlin.
“Therefore,
the purpose of this operation is to put pressure on the German
government, whose Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder has repeatedly declared
opposition to invading Iraq, and refused publicly to help the U.S. in
that direction,” Shabeeb explained
