IRAQ: Kidnapped French journalist Florence Aubenas, taken hostage with her driver in Baghdad more than seven weeks ago, made a desperate appeal for help in a video tape released by Iraqi insurgents yesterday.
"My name is Florence Aubenas. I'm French. I'm a journalist with Libération," she said on the undated tape, speaking in broken English and looking distraught and exhausted.
"My health is very bad. I'm very bad psychologically also," she said, staring at the camera intently. Dressed in a grey sweatshirt and black trousers, she sat with her knees drawn up to her chest in front of a dark red background.
Her plight underscored the security crisis in Iraq, where a new post-election government, yet to be formed, faces suicide bombings, shootings and kidnappings in an insurgency that shows no signs of easing nearly two years after the US invasion.
The tape is the first of Ms Aubenas (43) to be released since she and her Iraqi driver, Hussein Hanun al-Saadi, were seized in Baghdad on January 5th, and the first indication that she is alive.
The driver does not appear in the tape. Looking frail, Ms Aubenas sounded desperate and appealed for help to a French parliamentarian.
"I ask particularly for the help of the French deputy Didier Julia. Help me, Mr Julia, help me. It's urgent," she said.
Mr Julia, a member of the lower house of parliament from President Jacques Chirac's conservative UMP party, went to Iraq last September in a freelance effort to try to secure the release of two other kidnapped French journalists.
The effort failed and the government denied it had approved his intervention.
When the journalists, Christian Chesnot and Georges Malbrunot, were finally released in December after four months in captivity, they criticised Mr Julia's mission.
The French government told Mr Julia not to undertake any personal initiative to help Ms Aubenas, a senior member of the ruling conservative party said.
The foreign editor of Libération, François Sergent, said: "It is both what we feared and what we hoped for." He had not seen the video. "It is a sign that they are alive, of course."
Ms Aubenas is one of two female journalists being held. Italian Giuliana Sgrena, a reporter for Rome daily Il Manifesto, was abducted early last month in Baghdad.
A tape of her pleading for her life was released nearly two weeks ago.