DUBLIN (Reuters) - Palestinian President Yasser Arafat is to lobby for the release of Kenneth Bigley, the British engineer held hostage in Iraq, Irish and Palestinian officials say.
"President Arafat officially asked me to talk to all Iraqi political forces and friends ... We hope to convince kidnappers to release all foreign hostages including Kenneth Bigley," Palestinian Telecommunications Minister Azzam al-Ahmad told Reuters on Tuesday.
Arafat’s intervention came after an Irish politician wrote to the Palestinian leader asking him to help free Bigley.
Michael D. Higgins, foreign affairs spokesman for Ireland’s Labour Party, said he wrote to Arafat via his representatives in Dublin after talking to Bigley’s brother Paul.
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In the letter, Higgins stressed Bigley’s mother’s Irish roots and the fact Ireland has maintained a neutral stance on the U.S.-led war in Iraq.
"Yesterday (the representative) rang me to confirm that President Yasser Arafat had sent him a letter ... saying he would do everything he could," Higgins told Reuters.
The 62-year-old Bigley was taken hostage in Baghdad on September 16 along with Americans Eugene Armstrong and Jack Hensley, who were later beheaded.
Bigley’s family made emotional televised appeals for his captors to show mercy and a video was released of Bigley pleading with Prime Minister Tony Blair to intervene. British Muslim leaders have also travelled to Iraq to try and negotiate a release.
It was not clear what influence, if any, Arafat had over the suspected chief hostage-taker Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
Higgins said he had contacted Arafat because "he had been of assistance before" in other hostage situations.
Ahmad added: "We do not have direct contacts with the hostage takers because their names are not known. We have contacts, through our embassy in Baghdad, with our friends and some political factions there."
Bigley was snatched from a house in an affluent central Baghdad neighbourhood in the latest in a six-month campaign of abductions of foreigners in Iraq.
As well as the two Americans and the Briton, four Europeans are known to have been taken hostage in the past few weeks -- two male French journalists and two Italian female aid workers.
