Iraqi captors free 2 Japanese hostages after video released

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- Insurgents freed two Japanese hostages unharmed Saturday, a day after gunmen released a video of a kidnapped U.S. soldier and offered to swap him for prisoners detained by Americans.\nThe latest release leaves 15 foreigners missing or confirmed kidnapped in a spate of abductions that erupted alongside some of the worst violence in the country since the U.S.-led invasion. A Dane and a businessman from the United Arab Emirates were reported seized Friday.\nOne hostage, an Italian security guard, was killed earlier this week, the only hostage known to have been slain since the start of the kidnappings. Gunmen have threatened to kill three other Italian hostages.\nIraq's Interior Ministry announced Saturday it would set up a committee to deal with the mounting number of abductions.\n"Foreign ambassadors are contacting us continuously after each kidnapping event asking about their citizens," Interior Minister Samir Shaker Mahmoud said Saturday. "This gives a bad impression of Iraq, which we don't want to continue."\nAid worker Nobutaka Watanabe, 36, and freelance journalist Jumpei Yasuda, 30, were freed at a mosque in Baghdad and taken to the Japanese Embassy, said Foreign Ministry spokesman Jiro Okuyama.\n"It's great that we're free," Watanabe told Japan's NHK television by telephone. He said he and Yasuda were not threatened by their captors.\nAll five Japanese taken hostage recently in Iraq have now been freed. Three Japanese kidnapped in Iraq over a week ago were released Thursday.\nThe hostage crisis was a serious test of Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's resolve to resist pressure to end his nation's military involvement in Iraq. Japan has some 500 troops in southern Iraq.\nThe wave of abductions began as the U.S. military fought Sunni insurgents in the central city of Fallujah and rebel Shiites in the south. Hostages have been seized in both parts of the country.\nThe Arabic TV network Al-Jazeera, meanwhile, aired a video Friday night of a clearly frightened U.S. soldier, Pfc. Keith Maupin, surrounded by masked gunmen holding assault rifles.\nMaupin, of Batavia, Ohio, and another soldier, Sgt. Elmer C. Krause, 40, of Greensboro, N.C., were listed as missing after their convoy was attacked April 9 outside Baghdad. Both soldiers were assigned to the Army Reserve's 724th Transportation Company, based at Bartonville, Ill.\nMaupin is the second American and first U.S. serviceman known to be kidnapped by insurgents fighting the U.S.-led coalition since the end of war. Thomas Hamill, a 43-year-old truck driver from Mississippi, was also abducted April 9.\nOn the tape, the gunman was heard saying: "Some of our groups managed to capture one of the American soldiers, and he is one of many others. He is being treated according to the treatment of prisoners in the Islamic religion, and he is in good health."\n"We are keeping him to be exchanged for some of the prisoners captured by the occupation forces," the gunman added.\nIn Rome, the families of three Italians whom hostage takers have threatened to kill pleaded Saturday for the lives of their loved ones.\n"We are simple people like you, and we appeal to your religious consciences as believers in God," Antonella Agliana, the sister of one of the hostages, said in a video aired Saturday on the Arabic news network Al-Jazeera.\n"Spare the lives of our boys, who have nothing to do with politics," she said.