Taken at Gunpoint, U.S. Journalist and His Interpreter Are Missing in Iraq

August 17, 2004
By JOHN F. BURNS

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Aug. 16 - Micah Garen, an American journalist who was investigating the looting of ancient artifacts in Iraq, was missing along with his Iraqi interpreter on Monday after the two were led at gunpoint on Friday from a shop in the southern city of Nasiriya, according to news reports and the men's families.

Mr. Garen's family, in New Haven, said they had received information that he was still alive, but declined to release any further information, saying that his well-being required them to say as little as possible.

According to APTN, the television arm of The Associated Press, a shopkeeper in Nasiriya said in an interview on Monday that two armed men had entered his shop on Friday evening and led away Mr. Garen and his interpreter, Amir Doshe. A senior official in the city, Adnan al-Soirafy, quoting information given by the interpreter's family, confirmed that the two men had disappeared.

Mr. Garen, 36, a documentary filmmaker specializing in archaeology, has spent much of the past year investigating the looting of ancient artifacts from sites near Nasiriya that date to the Sumerian civilization, as many as 5,000 years ago. He told friends that his research for a film on the looting had uncovered gangs that have made a virtual industry of ransacking sites and exporting the looted treasures to antiquities markets across the world, and that he considered some of the gangs potentially dangerous.

The range of possible abductors also included insurgent groups that have virtually paralyzed normal life in Nasiriya, 230 miles south of Baghdad, in recent weeks. The most powerful of these is the Mahdi Army, the militia force loyal to the cleric Moktada al-Sadr, whose insurrection has reached at least eight cities across southern Iraq.

Mr. Garen's father, Alan Garen, e-mailed a brief statement on behalf of the family to The New York Times on Monday from New Haven, where he is a professor of molecular biophysics and biochemistry at Yale University. The statement said his son "went to Iraq fully aware of the dangers, but determined to alert the world to the tragic loss of an irreplaceable archaeological heritage."

But Dr. Garen, who offered no further explanation, appeared to leave open the possibility that the abductors could have been from the gangs of looters, or from other groups that felt threatened by his son's work.

"His remarkable intelligence, charm and thirst for understanding led him to seek information from all available sources," the statement said. "He refused to turn aside in the face of injustice and inhumanity even from those with the power and responsibility to provide protection, and he is now in mortal danger."

A spate of kidnappings has struck Iraq in recent months. Criminal gangs have targeted Iraqis, often abducting women and children and demanding large ransoms. But the most deadly abductions have been of foreigners, particularly truck drivers who have been part of the supply chain for American troops. Most of the abductions have taken place in the Sunni Muslim areas west of Baghdad, especially around Falluja, and some have ended with beheadings.

Abductions have also been common in the Shiite heartland of southern Iraq, but have less often ended with killings. Mr. Sadr, the Mahdi Army leader, has condemned the practice, and his representatives in Basra intervened over the weekend to secure the quick release of a British journalist who had been taken at gunpoint from his hotel room.

Mr. Garen has a reputation among other reporters for his intrepid style. During his investigation of the archaeological looting, he has told friends about finding large networks of looters and smugglers and that there was evidence they had received protection from some Iraqi officials. In recent weeks, he was working on a written account of his experiences that he had offered for publication in The New York Times.

Often, he has driven long distances to and from Baghdad, across territory that many reporters consider too dangerous because of frequent ambushes, bombings and other attacks by rebels. He made one such journey on Friday, having lunch with friends in Baghdad before beginning the four-hour drive to Nasiriya in what he expected to be a last, quick visit to complete his fieldwork on the documentary and the article for The Times.

From the accounts of his abduction, it appeared that he was picked up shortly after arriving in Nasiriya on that journey.