Second Briton is held in Baghdad
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Your support makes all the difference.A YORKSHIREMAN said to have been on a lone overland cycling tour to Australia has been arrested in northern Iraq and faces charges of illegal entry into the country, the Foreign Office revealed yesterday.
News of the detention of Michael Wainwright, 42, in a Baghdad police station means Iraq is now holding two Britons at a time when the two countries are on a virtual war footing.
Paul Ride, a catering manager from north-east London, was jailed for seven years last week for allegedly entering Iraq illegally. His wife believes Mr Ride, 33, may have been kidnapped by Iraqi agents inside Kuwait for use as a hostage during the crisis over southern Iraq.
Two RAF Tornados were among the first allied aircraft in the air over southern Iraq yesterday to monitor Saddam Hussein's treatment of Shia Muslims and put an exclusion zone into effect against the Iraqi air force.
Kurdish fighters in the region where Mr Wainwright is said to have been picked up say he, too, may have been kidnapped by infiltrators behind Kurdish lines. 'The word is Saddam has been offering 50,000 dinars ( pounds 2,000) for foreigners dead or, even better, alive,' a Kurdish official said yesterday. 'Iraqi saboteurs have been shooting at foreigners who do not have armed escorts.'
Mr Wainwright, from the Halifax area and thought to be divorced, has, in fact, been held for more than three months - longer than Mr Ride - according to the Foreign Office. He is thought to have crossed from south-eastern Turkey into northern Iraq in early May, a Foreign Office spokesman said yesterday.
When his family heard nothing from him - he previously wrote regular letters - Britain asked the usual intermediaries in Iraq, the Russian embassy and the International Committee of the Red Cross, to look for him.
They had no success. It was only when his parents in Yorkshire received a letter from Mr Wainwright on 17 August, saying he had been arrested in northern Iraq for entering without a visa, that he was traced to a Baghdad police station cell. 'They allowed me to cross the border, then they arrested me,' he wrote to his parents. 'My passport is in order. They said illegal entry without a visa, which I applied for.'
Russian diplomats in Baghdad, who hope to visit Mr Wainwright within the next two weeks, say he may have been arrested in a no man's land between Kurdish and Iraqi forces near the northern Iraqi city of Mosul. Yesterday's Foreign Office statement said he had been arrested in Mosul.
Tornados over Iraq, page 11
Leading article, page 26
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