Credit Taken for Hostages’ Release : Mideast: An American peace delegation cites its intervention in Baghdad as laying the groundwork for the expected freeing of four ailing Americans.

An American peace delegation that included several Southern Californians asserted Friday that its intervention in Baghdad had resulted in the expected release of four ailing American hostages, announced by Iraq on Thursday.

The Fellowship of Reconciliation, a 75-year-old pacifist group based in Nyack, N.Y., led a 21-member delegation into Iraq from Amman, Jordan, on Oct. 20. Douglas Hostetter, delegation leader and executive secretary of the Fellowship, said that when the group left Baghdad on Oct. 27, two members stayed behind to complete paper work for the hostages’ release.

Those two, Roman Catholic Bishop Michael Kinny of Juneau, Alaska, and Tarek Mohammed el Heneidy, an Egyptian-born naturalized U.S. citizen, will accompany the hostages out of Iraq via Jordan. They are expected to arrive in New York on Monday, Hostetter said.

Based on details about the hostages that Heneidy provided by telephone, Hostetter said the most severely ailing is believed to be Randall Trinh, 49, of Hacienda Heights, Calif., a naturalized American citizen from Vietnam who is suffering from peptic ulcers.

One delegation member, the Rev. Mary Jensen of Emmanuel Lutheran Church in North Hollywood, said that because she is also a registered nurse, the U.S. Embassy had urged her to try to see Trinh while in Baghdad. Although she and several members of the clergy managed to see 19 American detainees living at a “safe house” in the Iraqi capital, repeated requests to see Trinh were denied.

“They heard he was very ill,” Jensen said in an interview. “He’d been scheduled for surgery in Kuwait in mid-August, but it had been canceled. I think he was in hiding in Kuwait until recently, but someone turned him in.”

The other hostages, as described by Hostetter and a U.S. official in Baghdad, include: Raymond Gales, a diplomat stationed in Kuwait and now in Baghdad who is said to have a thyroid ailment; Michael Barnes, who reportedly has prostate cancer, and Dr. Abdul Kanji, 50, of Glencoe, Ill., an oncologist who was taken hostage after arriving in Iraq on July 30 for a one-week pilgrimage to two holy cities.

Hostetter said they had met Kanji, “and he said the other pilgrims were of Arab descent and were allowed to leave. He’s a Muslim, but he’s from India. He became a (U.S.) citizen in 1980.”

The Fellowship delegation--which advocates a non-military settlement to the Persian Gulf crisis--arrived with $67,000 in medical supplies, vitamins, penicillin and other antibiotics. They gave them to a Jordanian evacuee camp and to the Iraqi Red Crescent Society.