Italian journalists leave after warning

ROME — Italian reporters and photographers began evacuating Iraq yesterday under pressure from Italy’s government and threats of kidnappings.

Carabinieri police commandos from the Italian Embassy in Baghdad escorted correspondents for the newspapers La Repubblica and Corriere della Sera and state-run television RAI.

Italian Foreign Minister Gianfranco Fini prompted the evacuation with a warning of additional and imminent kidnappings of Italian journalists by Iraqi terrorists.

Mr. Fini said the warning was based on intelligence from the Italian military secret service, SISMI. Gunmen kidnapped Giuliana Sgrena, a reporter for the left-wing daily Il Manifesto, nearly three weeks ago.

Mr. Fini called the unusual request for Italian reporters to quit Iraq “a precautionary measure following similar ones by the Foreign Ministry in recent weeks” discouraging other Italian citizens from staying in Iraq.

He denied speculation that the decision was in response to a demand by Mrs. Sgrena’s abductors as a prelude to requests for thousands of Italian troops to leave Iraq.

A video released last week showed Mrs. Sgrena, 57, as saying that “nobody should come to Iraq at the moment, not even journalists, no one.”

La Repubblica correspondent Renato Caprile was said to be the last Italian reporter at liberty in the Iraqi capital after RAI correspondent Agostino Mauriello and Corriere della Sera reporter Lorenzo Cremonesi arrived in Jordan.

Mr. Caprile was staying at the Italian Embassy before catching a flight out today.

Duilio Giammaria, a RAI reporter who had been en route to Baghdad via Kuwait, canceled the last leg of his trip and was in Dubai.

Italian reports said the abduction Monday in Mosul of an Iraqi journalist, Raida al Wazan, 36, and perhaps her 10-year-old daughter, indicated it was becoming next to impossible to work in Iraq.

In a valedictory dispatch from the Palestine Hotel, Mr. Caprile said he had received a telephone call from a regular source he used in the capital.

“The information your secret services has is serious,” the source reportedly told him. “They could even come and take you from inside your hotel room.”

A two-day strike by the staff had created an eerie atmosphere at the hotel, the reporter said, with other foreign guests limited to “a couple of contractors of unknown nationality and a few American soldiers barricaded in their rooms with weapons and ammunition.”

Italian reports said most French press have all but abandoned Baghdad after the Jan. 5 kidnapping of Florence Aubenas, a reporter for the French daily Liberation.