Iraq to Free at Least 157 Europeans

The Iraqi government has agreed to free at least 157 more Europeans stranded in Iraq and occupied Kuwait, Western officials said today. The announcement came a day after Iraq’s Parliament voted to free all Germans.

The Bush Administration, seeking global support for a U.N. resolution to wage war on Iraq, has called the Baghdad government’s piecemeal releases of hostages an attempt to divide the coalition arrayed against Saddam Hussein.

Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev today urged an immediate meeting of the U.N. Security Council on the gulf crisis without spelling out an agenda, while France said it backs U.S. proposals to prepare a U.N. resolution authorizing the possible use of force against Iraq.

There is general agreement among coalition members that the U.N.-ordered embargo on trade with Iraq is far from achieving its desired goal of forcing Hussein out of Kuwait.

Former heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali left Amman, Jordan, for Baghdad today for talks with Hussein on the gulf crisis. Ali was accompanied by two associates and two members of the Coalition to Stop U.S. Intervention in the Middle East.

French right-wing politician Jean Marie Le Pen, in Baghdad since Sunday, will take 83 European hostages to Strasbourg, seat of the European Parliament, a member of his delegation said. Le Pen is a member of the European Parliament, which is scheduled to discuss the gulf crisis on Thursday.

The delegation member, speaking on condition of anonymity, said those leaving Thursday would be 35 Britons, 15 Italians, 15 Germans, six Irish, five Dutch, three Danes, two Belgians, a Portuguese and a Greek.

He said two others who held French passports but were not full French citizens would fly out.

The head of a Swiss parliamentary delegation said today that 36 hostages would leave Thursday afternoon on a Swissair charter flight to Zurich. Edgar Oehler told a news conference that those allowed to leave include 16 Swiss, four Irish and two Britons.

Also today, the head of personnel for foreign workers at Ibn al-Bitar Hospital, said 38 staff members, most of them Irish, would be allowed to leave.