DOHA: Sri Lanka's ambassador in Doha, A L Mohammed Yoosuf, met noted Islamic scholar, Dr yusuf Al Qaradawi, here on Monday and urged him for help in securing the release of a Sri Lankan hostage in Iraq.
"I met Dr Al Qaradawi and made a fervent plea to him to contact leading Muslim clerics in Iraq and urge them to appeal for the release of the poor Sri Lankan worker," the envoy told The Peninsula yesterday.
The meeting between him and Dr Al Qaradawi took place at Qatar University.
The 37-year-old abducted Sri Lankan comes from a very poor family from Colombo and was a driver with a Kuwaiti firm. He was sent to neighbouring Iraq by his employers.
Nobody knows when and who took him hostage but he remains in the custody of some group in Baghdad, the Sri Lankan ambassador who appeared on Al Jazeera television channel twice recently to appeal for his compatriot's release, said.
Yoosuf is one of the three Muslim ambassadors Sri Lanka, a country with Buddhist majority, has in the GCC. Sri Lankan envoys in Kuwait and Oman are Muslim. "This is the month of holy Ramadan. It is a month of piety for us, the Muslims. My appeal to the abductors is that if they are true Muslims, they must not hurt an innocent non-Muslim," the Lankan envoy said.
He said that he and the other two Muslim Sri Lankan envoys in the GCC are making a joint plea for the release of the Lankan hostage in Baghdad.
Sri Lanka did not support the war in Iraq and banned the travel of its citizens to the country to work. "Maybe, the Sri Lankan worker who is taken hostage is mistaken to have been working for an American company. If that's the notion of his abductors, it is completely wrong. He was working with a Kuwaiti company," the ambassador said.
He said that his country had also asked companies in Kuwait and Jordan, especially, not to send Sri Lankan employees to Iraq. There is a large number of Sri Lankan workers in Kuwait and Jordan.
© The Peninsula 2004
