Reply #6: Missing Anglicans feared dead

[DoYouEverWonder]

September 30, 2005
By Ruth Gledhill, Religion Correspondent

HOPE was fading last night for the leadership team of the main Anglican church in Iraq, who are presumed to have been killed while returning from a conference in Jordan.

The team of five Iraqi-born Anglicans, including the lay pastor of St George’s Church and his deputy, should have returned two weeks ago but were apparently attacked en route.

Canon Andrew White, of the Foundation for Reconciliation in the Middle East, who is the clergyman in charge of the church, said: “There is no news, and no news is bad news. The reality is that, after two weeks, it is going to be very strange to get any news. The awful thing is that in these situations we often just never hear anything at all.”

Had they been kidnapped, there would have been a ransom demand by now, he said.

“They are almost certainly dead,” the Most Rev Clive Handford, president bishop of the Episcopal Church in Jerusalem and the Middle East, said. “They had just entered some of the most dangerous country in Iraq where there are an enormous number of robberies. People will steal cars, money, anything of value, and sometimes people get killed.”

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,7374-1804226,00.html