Claims of Marine’s Slaying Are Denied

A bit of hope and a lot of uncertainty gripped this Salt Lake City suburb Sunday as conflicting accounts emerged as to whether local Marine Cpl. Wassef Ali Hassoun, held hostage in Iraq, was dead or alive.

Two websites announced Saturday that a radical Islamic group had beheaded Hassoun, but the group said Sunday that those claims were untrue.

“We don’t know anything yet -- we just keep praying,” said Tarek Nosseir, a local Muslim leader and spokesman for the Hassoun family.

The websites, used in the past to post word of extremist actions against the U.S.-led forces and their contractors, carried a letter Saturday from Abu Abdullah Hassan bin Mahmoud, who claimed to be head of the Ansar al Sunna Army in Qaim, an Iraqi town near the border with Syria. Those Internet sites previously reported the decapitations of American telecommunications contractor Nicholas Berg in May and South Korean interpreter Kim Sun Il in June.

“We would like to inform you that the Marine of Lebanese origin, Hassoun, has been slaughtered. You are going to see the video with your very own eyes soon,” the Saturday postings said.

The retraction by the Ansar al Sunna Army failed to make clear whether the militants were denying that Hassoun had been killed or that they were the source of Saturday’s announcement.

“The media have published, quoting the Lebanese Foreign Ministry, that Ansar al Sunna has killed the American hostage of Lebanese origin who was kidnapped in Iraq,” Sunday’s statement on the group’s website read. “To maintain our credibility in all matters, we must say that this statement that was attributed to us has no basis in truth.”

The unsigned statement said that only information on its own website should be considered valid. The site was later blocked.

The statement offered some hope to both Muslim and non-Muslim Utahans already mourning for the 24-year-old Hassoun.

A moment of silence planned at a Fourth of July rodeo near Salt Lake City to commemorate the death of Hassoun was canceled. Local churches rewrote lessons offering solace upon death to those offering prayers for immediate deliverance.

“I talked about Wassef Hassoun, but only in regards to the uncertainty of his situation,” said West Jordan Mayor Bryan Holladay, a lay pastor at his local Mormon Church. “There seems to be a question of his fate. This whole thing has been very sobering for us. We are hoping for the best but fearing the worst.”

The mayor said this city of 95,000 had seen tragedy before. A local policeman was slain a few years ago, and six teenagers were once killed in a car accident. But nothing, he said, had put the town on the international stage the way this hostage crisis had.

“We’d love to see this resolved positively, but we realize this is a war, and it’s not a war where the other side is playing fairly,” he said.

Hassoun was last seen with his Marine unit June 19. He was reported missing two days later. His status was revised to “captured” after a group calling itself Islamic Response sent a video to the Arabic satellite TV channel Al Jazeera on June 27 showing him blindfolded and seated with a sword poised above the back of his neck.

On Sunday, the U.S. military information center in Baghdad said it had no fresh word on Hassoun’s fate.

Hassoun emigrated from Lebanon with his family in the early 1990s, settling in West Jordan, about 15 miles south of Salt Lake City. His father, mother and brother are currently back in Lebanon. Hassoun’s father, Ali, has begged the kidnappers to show mercy to his son, a fellow Muslim. The remaining family members in West Jordan have stayed cloistered in their home with heavy drapes over the windows, refusing to talk to reporters.

Imam Shuaib-ud Din, who leads the Khadeeja Mosque where the Hassouns sometimes worship, warned the media not to immediately accept the claim of the Marine’s death.

“We urged them not to jump on the bandwagon,” he said Sunday, just before afternoon prayers. “The family still has hope that what was said earlier is not factual.”

The Marine’s brother, Sami, told Associated Press in Tripoli, Lebanon, that the family regarded the statement by the Ansar al Sunna Army as “a big relief” and clung to the hope that Hassoun was alive.

Utah Muslims say the family has chosen to remain silent mostly for cultural and religious reasons.

“There are religious overtones to the way they are handling their grief,” the imam said. “The idea is your grief, your anxiety, your frustration should be expressed to God, not to the world. It’s implied in the teachings of the Koran that if Allah has the cure to all problems, it follows that you should address them to him.”

Not many in the Hassouns’ largely Mormon, neatly manicured subdivision know the family well, but that hasn’t stopped an outpouring of goodwill.

A local Boy Scout troop erected two dozen American flags around the house. Churches have held prayer services and offered food and other assistance. Flowers are piling up in the driveway, and yellow ribbons have appeared around trees.

Milton Kelly was given permission by the family to plant a red U.S. Marine Corps flag in their yard.

“He happens to be a neighbor and a fellow Marine, and we look out for each other,” the 61-year-old Vietnam veteran said. “We are hoping that today’s news that he hasn’t been killed is true. It’s something for someone born in Lebanon to go to war for their adoptive country.”

If confirmed, Hassoun’s beheading would be the fourth such execution in two months of individuals who worked for U.S. interests in the Middle East. In addition to Berg and Kim, Lockheed Martin Corp. engineer Paul M. Johnson Jr. was slain by a group in Saudi Arabia on June 18.

Kelly reported from West Jordan and Williams from Baghdad.