Enzo Baldoni, who’s killing him one more time?

On March 25 2006, Al Jazeera broadcast an interview with a man “identified” as Mr Ibrahim al-Shemmari and described him as the spokesman of the Islamic Army in Iraq. Talking about the kidnapping and killing of journalists in Iraq, this man said that his group’s interrogators questioned each journalist and a court-like body issued its verdict: “if he was found innocent he would be freed and if he was caught red-handed in a certain situation with the occupation then he would be handled in a manner that is in line with the interests of Jihad in Iraq”. He said also that Enzo Baldoni, the Italian journalist kidnapped and allegedly assassinated by his group in August 2004, was a spy, adding that journalists and other non-military foreigners were not targets “so long as they were committed to their professions”. We have not the text of the interview, but we know that, once questioned about Baldoni, he said that “it was clear from the beginning that he was a spy. Evidence were abundant but the French journalists were freed”. Strange indeed that while talking about two hundred abducted foreigners, this man stressed the killing of the sole Italian man, and emphasized the relation with the seizing of the French journalists Chesnot and Malbrunot, kidnapped in the same period. It has to be underlined that the French journalists reported they were told from the kidnappers that Enzo Baldoni was seized by their same group, but in their description about those days we cannot find a single moment, in the first times of their captivity, in which Baldoni should have been actually shot, at least not in the proximity of the same building. It has also to be stressed that Ghareeb, Baldoni’s so called interpreter, was actually a well known humanitarian in Iraq, at least since some reports were put on the internet in April 2004, and he was likely shot in the car in which he was traveling with Baldoni, at once, without any question or court-like verdict, just before Baldoni’s kidnapping. Enzo’s body has never been found, Ghareeb’s dead body simply vanished after having been carried to the nearest hospital, where anyway somebody took some shots of it. Well, is this so called spokesman of the Islamic Army a plain liar or a fake at all? Does he know actually something nobody else is aware of? Or was this man, this spokeman, simply used? Who “gave” him and his group the alleged evidence about Enzo being a spy? We don’t believe a single word about that and, more important, we know Enzo was well known as a fair man, a humanitarian and a great freelance, a brave journalist and blogger, and moreover he used to write on his blog, called “Bloghdad”, a report of every single movement in Iraq since his arrival in that country. He wrote about his travels to Najaf and Fallujah and how he had met journalists of a first independent paper down there. Those were the information one happened to find in the internet. We know the abductors were expert surfers of the net, at least that is what Chesnot and Malbrunot wrote. Who had any interest in spreading fake and dangerous things about Enzo Baldoni? We know somebody seized and killed him, we don’t know who is trying to assassinate his memory as well.