MIDEAST : Concern Growing for Missing Iraqi Reporter : Subhy Haddad disappeared after being summoned by police in January. Family has found no trace of him.

For 30 years, Subhy Haddad has been a fixture in the world of Iraqi journalism. Local and foreign news agencies came to depend on his cautious, accurate reports from Iraq’s capital.

When a visiting foreign correspondent arrived here, he inevitably was welcomed into Haddad’s office for a chat and a cup of tea. After years of working for such respected news agencies as Reuters and the Associated Press, Haddad, 55, was hired on at a good salary for the Japanese daily newspaper Asahi Shimbun.

Now Tokyo--and much of the rest of the world--wants to know: Where is Haddad?

His reports abruptly stopped at the beginning of this year, when he was summoned for what was to be a brief interview with Iraqi secret police. He reassured his worried wife, kissed her goodby and left for the police station.

No one has heard from him since Jan. 27.

His wife, Neriman, recalled of her husband’s disappearance: “A call came from Iraqi intelligence at about 8 in the morning. They asked him to be there at 8:30. He said, ‘But I can’t, I have to take a shower first.’ They said it would be better for him to be on time.

“He went there, and after two hours they came and searched the house,” she said. “They took all of his telexes, all his communications with Asahi and copies of his articles. And that was it.”

Anyone familiar with Iraqi intelligence agencies knows that this story, if possible, is even more chilling than it sounds. A great many people have been arrested in Iraq and simply never heard from again. Others have been detained, only to have their bodies, and sometimes those of their family members, put on public display a few days later.

In the last case of a celebrated journalist being arrested, Farzad Bazoft, an Iranian-born reporter working for London’s Observer newspaper, was accused of spying and swiftly executed after a five-hour, closed-door trial in 1990.

“Brought up largely in Britain, Farzad--no more than the rest of us--could have had little real idea of the gap between the acceptable face of Iraq, in the Foreign Ministry officials whom he knew, and the brutality of the security forces of the regime that lay behind,” Adrian Hamilton, the Observer’s deputy editor, said in a eulogy.

Neriman believes that Iraqi intelligence officials were upset about a story Haddad filed shortly before his arrest. The story focused on military exercises conducted in January northeast of Baghdad, the first to be held since the conclusion of the Gulf War. It was one of two articles officers seized when they searched the house. The second was about the economic situation in Iraq under the international embargo.

Yet the military story Haddad wrote--which never got sent to Asahi--was no different than what a British newspaper had published days earlier, she said. Details of the exercises were also published by Iraq’s official news agency.

Over the course of the first few weeks, Neriman and Haddad’s other family members visited police stations and government departments all over Iraq, inquiring about his whereabouts.

“We tried to meet so many officials, but it seems nobody cares to interfere with Iraqi intelligence,” she said. “They told us not to go anywhere, not to ask about him, not to go somewhere to complain about the case--to just leave it to them and he will come out sometime: in a week, in a month, nobody knows.”

Now it has been months, and Neriman has decided to talk publicly for the first time--a decision that could put her and her 22-month-old daughter, Niveen, in jeopardy.

Asahi Shimbun has lodged a formal inquiry and complaint with the Iraqi Ministry of Information and, through the Japanese Embassy, with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. So far, there has been no reply.

But a newspaper spokesman said he had been told unofficially that the arrest had nothing to do with Haddad’s work as a journalist. Some in Baghdad, he said, speculated that Haddad was suspected of illegally transferring his salary into overseas bank accounts.

Neriman said her husband’s high salary for Asahi, which she estimated at $5,000 a month, was much-discussed in sanctions-ridden Baghdad. “Some of his friends were always talking about Subhy being a multimillionaire. So these rumors have a great effect on the case. Nobody believes an Iraqi journalist gets such a salary,” she said.

In a recent interview in Baghdad, Hamid Youssef Hammadi, Iraq’s minister of information, was asked about Haddad’s whereabouts. His face fell from a smile into a scowl. “I’m not responsible for that,” he said curtly. Asked if he simply had information about his fate, Hammadi walked to the door and gestured for his guest to leave. “I have no information,” he said.

Neriman had been Haddad’s secretary at Asahi before the two fell in love and decided to marry. “He is very kind and very gentle and smart. Educated. Everything. . . . We were very much in love, and since we were married, we haven’t been separated. This is the first time,” Neriman said.

Now she keeps pictures of her husband around the house and shows them often to Niveen, to remind her of what her father looks like. “Before she sleeps at night, she kisses his photos,” she said. “She says, ‘Papa will come.’ ”