Gunmen kidnap Iraqi coach for blind athletes

National basketball federation chief also abducted amid kidnapping wave

updated 4:54 p.m. ET Nov. 1, 2006

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Two Sunni coaches, including a blind team captain and the head of Iraq’s national basketball federation, on Wednesday became the latest victims of a wave of kidnappings targeting sports figures.

Police Lt. Ali Mohsin said men in four SUVs drove up to a youth club on Palestine Street in eastern Baghdad. They seized the basketball federation chief Khalid Nejim, who also was a coach for the national basketball team, and Issam Khalef, who coached blind athletes.

Palestine Street is a relatively prosperous thoroughfare near the Shiite slum of Sadr City, a stronghold of hard-line anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, whose Mahdi Army militia has been linked to scores of abductions and torture killings of Sunnis.

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While Nejim, 50, resisted the abductors, Khalef, who is blind and also serves as the captain for his goalball team, went with his captors quietly, said Qahtan al-Namei, chief of Iraq’s Paralympics Federation.

Twelve people were in the club at the time of the abductions, including the coaches, seven blind players, a guard who was quickly disarmed, an assistant and a driver, al-Namei said.

He said it appeared only the coaches were taken because they were Sunnis, while the rest were Shiite. He said the kidnappers, who carried automatic weapons and wore no masks, had not demanded a ransom or otherwise contacted the federation.

“There is a distinct possibility that this was simply an act of violence targeting Iraqi sports,” al-Namei said.

Despite the abductions, al-Namei said the team was still determined to participate in a tournament for disabled athletes in Malaysia later this month. Goalball is played by blind or visually impaired athletes using a ball that has bells inside that is thrown toward goals on a court.

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Athletes and sports officials have increasingly become targets of threats, kidnappings and assassination attempts, with an Iraqi international soccer referee kidnapped just last month as he left the soccer association’s offices. The kidnappers reportedly demanded a $200,000 ransom.

Days earlier, gunmen killed a 37-year-old former Iraqi national volleyball player, Naseer Shamil, in his shop in Baghdad, while 22-year-old Ghanim Ghudayer, a popular Iraqi soccer player who was a member of the country’s Olympic team was kidnapped in September. He has not been heard from since.

In July, Iraq’s national soccer coach, Akram Ahmed Salman, resigned after receiving death threats against him and his family.

That came shortly after gunmen kidnapped the chairman of Iraq’s National Olympic Committee and at least 30 other officials, including the presidents of the tae kwon do and boxing federations, in a bold daylight raid on a sports conference in the heart of Baghdad. Iraq’s national wrestling coach, a Sunni, was killed around the same time in a Shiite district of Baghdad.