Susanne Osthoff, 43, an archaeologist who has spent many years in Iraq and a convert to Islam, was abducted with her Iraqi driver last Friday. She is the first German citizen to be kidnapped in Iraq. News of her abduction only came out on Monday night when a messenger delivered a video tape to the Baghdad office of Germany's ARD television channel demanding that it broadcast the footage.

ARD refused to air the tape but broadcast a still photo taken from it showing two hostages sitting on the ground surrounded by three armed men, one holding a rocket propelled grenade launcher on his shoulder. In the tape, the kidnappers threaten to kill the hostages unless the German government ceases its co-operation with the Iraqi government, ARD said.

Germany has no troops in Iraq and former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder opposed the US-led invasion. However, some Iraqi police have been trained by German experts outside the country. Beyond that, relations between the two countries are limited to economic and cultural ties. Merkel, who took office only a week ago, said her government would do all it could to secure the hostages' release.

"The government strongly condemns this act. A crisis task force has been set up in the Foreign Ministry with contact to all the relevant authorities in order to secure the fate of both hostages," a stern-faced Merkel told reporters. "All efforts of the government are focused on the security of those affected and protecting their lives. In these difficult hours, our thoughts and compassion are with their friends and family." She did not discuss the demands of the kidnappers.

Merkel's task force -- made up of a dozen officials from the Foreign Ministry, Interior Ministry and BND intelligence agency -- is seeking mediators in a bid to contact the kidnappers and start negotiations. The Germans are likely to use the recent examples set by the French and Italians, who also had nationals abducted in Iraq.

Some 200 foreign nationals are known to have been kidnapped in Iraq since the US-led war in 2003, of whom 52 have been murdered, 41 in 2004 and eleven in 2005. This weekend, two Canadians, one US citizen and a Briton were also abducted.

Hostage killings have become rarer in recent months, possibly because terrorists have noticed that the practice is losing them support among sympathizers. Intelligence sources in Berlin said they did not recognize the name given by the group on the tape, a possible sign that it may not be linked to Abu Musab al-Sarkawi, the Jordanian-born al-Qaida leader in Iraq whose group has been responsible for a number of grisly hostage murders.

Italy and France have managed to negotiate the release of hostages in Iraq and steadfastly denied rumours that they had paid ransom money. The German government too has denied paying money to secure the freedom of hostages taken in the Philippines and the Sahara in recent years.

Previously threatened

Osthoff, who speaks fluent Arabic, has worked for the "Direkthilfe Irak" charity for a number of years, transporting drugs and medical equipment to Iraq. She won an award for bravery from Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper for being the first civilian to transport medical supplies to Baghdad from Jordan at the height of the war in 2003.

She had recently been planning to set up a German cultural center in Arbil, a town in northern Iraq, and had already held talks with the German embassy in Baghdad and the Kurdish regional government. She is reportedly married to an Arab man and has an 11-year-old daughter who is at boarding school in Germany.

According to the Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung, Osthoff had already come to the attention of terrorists this summer when she was living in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul. In October, she told the newspaper that a kidnapping threat had come from a group close to al-Zarkawi, and that US soldiers had escorted her from Mosul to the Green Zone in Baghdad for her own safety.

Osthoff's mother Ingrid said she had been obsessed with alleviating the suffering of people in Iraq. "She loves the people, the culture, the country, she's fanatical about it," her mother told Germany's n24 television. "If you see how badly off the people are there you almost get a guilty conscience that you're doing so well. She had to help." Michael Osang, a Munich-based doctor with whom she had worked, said Osthoff continued to transport medical supplies after the war, even resorting to taking Bedouin routes across the desert to bring in drugs from Syria.

She developed a love of Iraq while studying archaeology at Munich University and took part in excavations of Babylonian sites during the Iran-Iraq war during the 1980s. She has also joined digs in a number of other Arab countries.

Speculation about Ransom Payments

In several recent cases of abducted foreigners in Iraq, the governments involving -- including France and Italy -- are thought to have paid ransom money, even though they officially deny doing so.

Though publicly Germany also rejects the idea of paying for the lives of its citizens, some experts believe it has in the past, including a case involving 16 Germans abducted in the Sahara Desert by Algerian extremists in February 2003.
Berlin also is thought to have paid ransom for the release of the Wallert family taken hostage by Abu Sayyaf rebels on the southern Philippine island Jolo in April 2000.